2026 Zscaler India Campus SDE Prep: 37 Past OA / Interview Experiences (Part 3 :)

Continued from Part 2. The earlier FastPrep links will be added after those parts are published.

Coverage: Detailed timelines 10–16. These reports cover Summer Intern, SRE/DevOps, C++ ASE, Associate SWE/QA, Java/DevTest, and general Associate Software Engineer campus loops.

36 detailed candidate timelines, loops, and screens — continued

10: 2024 summer intern — plagiarism review, C coding, and linked lists

Report date: May 15, 2024 · Role: Summer Intern · Process: Campus hiring

Online assessment

1. Four coding questions with a wide difficulty range.
2. The candidate compared the hardest task with a Codeforces problem around 2000 rating.
3. They fully solved two questions and partly solved two.
4. The report does not publish the prompts.
5. The candidate warned that Zscaler reviewed OA snapshots for copying and unfair work.

Interview 1

1. Introduce yourself through academics, CGPA, competitive programming, projects, tech stack, and achievements.
2. Detect a cycle in a linked list and remove it.
3. Write recursive Fibonacci and analyze time and space.
4. Answer OS fundamentals.
5. Add two numbers using bit operations only.

Interview 2

1. Return to one partly solved OA problem. The candidate finished it after a small amount of help.
2. Write a C program that checks whether a string is a valid IPv4 address.
3. The candidate had little C experience and completed the task with interviewer guidance.
4. Work on a long linked-list operation problem. The candidate reached only a partial solution before time ran out.
5. Answer Computer Networks questions. The candidate said some were outside what they had studied and told the interviewer honestly.

The report does not state the final result.

11: SRE/DevOps intern — almost no live DSA, very deep fundamentals

Role: SRE/DevOps Intern · Process: On-campus · Result: Selected

Online assessment — 2 hours, HackerRank

1. Four coding questions: two easy, one medium, and one hard.
2. MCQs on Computer Networks, Operating Systems, DBMS, and puzzles.
3. The report does not publish the coding prompts.

Technical interview 1 — 1 hour

1. Walk through Linux boot.
2. Explain memory management, processes versus threads, and multithreading.
3. Explain HTTP, TCP handshake, SSL/TLS, DNS, and DHCP.
4. Use basic Linux commands.
5. Work through troubleshooting situations.

Technical interview 2 — 1 hour 45 minutes

1. Three interviewers continued with CN, OS, DBMS, and Linux.
2. Follow-up questions came from the candidate’s own words. A short definition was not enough.
3. The candidate said both live interviews had no DSA because this was an SRE role.

12: 2023 C++ ASE intern + PPO — pointers, endianness, and subnet logic

Interview date: September 2023 · Role: Associate Software Engineer, C++ Developer Intern + PPO · Process: On-campus · Result: Selected

Online assessment — 130 minutes

1. Around 600–700 students were eligible.
2. Four medium coding questions. Two were a little easier than the others.
3. The candidate solved all four.
4. Some students also solved all four but did not pass the plagiarism check.
5. Twenty-seven students moved to interviews.

Interview 1 — about 30 minutes

1. Explain the OA experience and one OA solution.
2. Walk through every TCP/IP layer and the protocols at each layer.
3. Explain the session layer and why encryption is needed.
4. Explain DNS in detail.
5. Eleven students moved to the next round.

Interview 2 — almost 2 hours

1. Cover C++ pointers in depth: void pointers, pointer size by architecture, const pointer versus pointer-to-const, and pointer arithmetic such as ptr + 10.
2. Explain whether two pointers can be added and why.
3. Write small pointer examples in HackerRank CodePair.
4. Explain little-endian and big-endian storage.
5. Draw the address map of a hexadecimal value in both orders.
6. Write a C++ function that detects the host endianness.
7. Implement a function with IP1, IP2, Mask1, and Mask2 that decides whether both addresses are in the same network.
8. The candidate handled classful addresses but not the classless case. The interviewer gave small hints.
9. Five students were asked to attend a third round, but this candidate was not. The next day, Zscaler still selected them along with three candidates who had taken round three.

13: Associate SWE / QA intern — Python data work, networking, SQL, and an unusual result

Report date: December 19, 2023 · Role: Associate Software Engineer / QA Engineer Intern · Process: On-campus · Result: Selected

Online assessment

1. Around 150 candidates were shortlisted for the assessment.
2. Thirty MCQs covered CN, OS, DBMS, and code snippets.
3. Four coding questions: matrix transpose, array manipulation, a calculation involving mean, and a hard string-manipulation task whose prompt the candidate forgot.
4. The candidate solved three coding questions.
5. The report says some friends who solved only two also advanced.

Interview 1 — about 1 hour

1. Around 34 students reached this round.
2. Share the screen and code data-cleaning tasks: change a date format, remove repeated data, slice lists and strings, read or store CSV-style data, work with sets and lists, and print dictionaries in different forms.
3. The source ends one conversion task mid-sentence, so its required output is unknown.
4. The candidate said they did not know Linux programming.
5. Explain DNS, TCP, UDP, subnet masks, subnetworks, IPv4, NAT, TCP retransmission, the three-way handshake, and why DNS usually uses UDP instead of TCP.
6. Create a SQL table. Explain Group By. Return the maximum salary with the employee’s name and ID. Explain keys and constraints.

Interview 2 — about 1 hour 5 minutes

1. Eight students reached this round.
2. Explain the project architecture and how the project works. The interviewer wanted a working project, not only an idea.
3. Answer more CN questions and easy SQL queries.
4. Write a prime-number program.
5. Explain how you improve a weak skill.
6. Explain how you would respond if a manager did not recognize good work or kept overloading you.
7. Explain why you wanted this role.

The candidate was not among the two people initially asked to take a third interview. However, the final list still included them. Five students were selected in total.

14: Java Dev / DevTest intern + PPO — three medium coding interviews

Interview date: May 2023 · Role: Java Dev / DevTest Intern + PPO · Location: Bengaluru · Result: No offer

Online assessment — 90 minutes

1. Three medium coding questions plus MCQs.
2. The source does not save the OA prompts.

Interview 1

1. Computer Networks and Operating Systems.
2. A String + HashMap task. The prompt is missing.
3. Two Sum in a Binary Search Tree. The report does not preserve the exact required output.

Interview 2

1. Find a pair with a target sum in a sorted array.
2. Search in a rotated sorted array.

Interview 3

1. Balanced Parentheses plus a follow-up variation. The follow-up is not saved.
2. More OS and CN.

15: DevTest engineer — the a1 string-compression rule

Interview date: September 2023 · Role: DevTest Engineer · Location: Gandhinagar, Gujarat · Result: Accepted offer

1. The candidate first completed an OA. The report does not publish it.
2. Three technical rounds followed: a core-fundamentals round, a DSA round, and a mixed round.
3. The one saved coding task was a String Compression variant.
4. Every run had to include its count. A character that appeared once had to become a1 rather than a.
5. The provided output buffer had twice the input string’s length.
6. The report does not give an example or say whether the edit had to be in place.

16: Associate Software Engineer — three OA questions, then a broad one-hour interview

Interview date: September 2023 · Role: Associate Software Engineer · Process: Campus placement · Result: No offer

1. The OA had three coding questions. The prompts were not published.
2. Only 11 students reached the online interview.
3. The interview lasted about one hour.
4. Questions covered Computer Networks, Operating Systems, and C++ fundamentals.
5. The source does not list the individual questions.

Part 4 continues with timelines 17–24.