SWIGGY · SYSTEM DESIGN

Swiggy system design interview questions

LLD / machine coding is the signature round at SDE-I and SDE-II and stresses extensibility and patterns. From SDE-II up, an HLD round is added, typically on real-time delivery or booking systems.

From public candidate reports and Swiggy's careers pages, checked November 2026. Processes vary by team. AlgoRung is not affiliated with Swiggy.

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Which levels get a design round

Level	Swiggy title	Design round	Low-level design
SDE 1	Associate Software Engineer / SDE-I	Usually not	Yes
SDE 2	SDE-II	Yes	Yes
Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3)	SDE-III	Yes	Yes
Staff Software Engineer	SDE-IV	Usually not	–

Design questions candidates report

Movie ticket booking

Design a ticket booking app where thousands of people fight over the same few hundred seats. Requirements and scale, the booking API and seat data model, then the hard parts: atomic multi-seat holds with expiry, optimistic versus pessimistic locking, tying payment to a hold without double booking, a virtual waiting room for blockbuster releases, live seat maps, and the trade-offs.
Full walkthrough: Movie booking
Expense sharing like Splitwise (LLD)

Design a wallet app where a hundred million people top up, send money to friends and pay shops. Requirements and scale, the wallet API and ledger data model, then the hard parts: atomic same-shard transfers that never go negative, cross-shard transfers with a saga and a clearing account, single-writer event sourcing for very high throughput, hot merchant accounts, holds, limits and reconciliation with the bank.
Full walkthrough: Digital wallet
Rate limiter (LLD)

A LADDER walkthrough of a rate limiter shared by many gateway servers: requirements, scale math for half a million requests a second and ten million keys, the rule and response API, Redis state, then the deep dives: choosing token bucket, atomic updates with a Lua script, keeping the added latency under a millisecond, sharding and hot keys, failing open, multiple regions and rolling out new rules safely.
Full walkthrough: Rate limiter Practise on the design board
Real-time delivery-partner tracking

How to design a food delivery platform that connects customers, restaurants and couriers: requirements, dinner-peak math, the order and tracking APIs, an order state machine with idempotent payments, ingesting courier GPS pings into an in-memory geo index, dispatch that scores and offers orders to couriers with timeouts and batching, ETAs from prep time and travel time, and the trade-offs.
Full walkthrough: Food delivery

Also reported

Parking lot (LLD)
Meeting scheduler (LLD)

How to answer any design question: the LADDER method · How the design round is scored by level · Low-level design and machine coding

Questions people ask

When does Swiggy ask system design?

A design round is part of the loop for SDE 1 (Associate Software Engineer / SDE-I), SDE 2 (SDE-II), Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) (SDE-III). LLD / machine coding is the signature round at SDE-I and SDE-II and stresses extensibility and patterns. From SDE-II up, an HLD round is added, typically on real-time delivery or booking systems.

What system design questions does Swiggy ask?

Candidates report: Movie ticket booking; Expense sharing like Splitwise (LLD); Rate limiter (LLD); Real-time delivery-partner tracking; Parking lot (LLD); Meeting scheduler (LLD).

System design questions at other companies

System design questions across all companies · Behavioral questions