Zerodha Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Zerodha hiring for Business Analytics roles
Zerodha is an Indian stockbroker known for discount brokerage and platforms like Kite, Console and Coin. It runs a relatively small in-house technology team that builds trading and back-office systems. Hiring for technical and analytics roles is limited and tends to value practical skills, open-source work and self-learning.
For Business Analytics roles, this Zerodha practice set focuses most on SQL for Business Analysis (9), Process Modelling and BPMN (8), Requirements and Agile (4), Excel for Business Analysts (4). It has 3 easy, 29 medium, 8 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Fintech
Headquarters
Bengaluru, India
Main India offices
Bengaluru
Zerodha Business Analytics interview process
Application review (projects or GitHub)
Technical discussion
Assignment or practical task
Founder or team round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
Solved for ZerodhaStart practicing
3 QUESTIONS FREESign up to unlock the full question bank and track your progress.Unlock every question and answer, then continue practising company-wise and package-wise.
✓ 3 questions free • Unlock the rest in seconds
01
What steps would you follow to create an AS-IS process map for a customer refund process?
Define the scope: where the process starts, such as a refund request, and where it ends, such as money credited. Identify the roles involved and draw swimlanes. Interview and observe each role, capturing steps, decisions, systems used, handoffs and time taken. Draw the flow in BPMN, mark pain points like rework loops and waiting time, and add measures such as average refund time. Validate the map with the people who do the work.
02
What is a SIPOC diagram and when do you use it before detailed process mapping?
SIPOC stands for Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs and Customers. It is a one-page, high-level table that lists 4 to 7 main process steps along with who supplies what and who receives the outputs. A BA uses it at the start of a process improvement project to agree on scope and boundaries with stakeholders before spending time on a detailed BPMN map. It prevents arguments later about where the process starts and ends.
A balanced scorecard is a strategic performance framework that tracks objectives and KPIs across four perspectives: financial (revenue growth, margin), customer (NPS, retention), internal processes (cycle time, defect rate) and learning and growth (training hours, employee engagement). The idea is that financial results are lagging, so leaders also need leading measures of what drives future performance. A strategy map links the objectives with cause-and-effect arrows from people to processes to customers to financial outcomes.
04
Two analysts report different monthly active user numbers from the same database. How do you resolve it?
Put both queries side by side and compare definitions: which events count as active, time zone, calendar versus rolling month, test and internal accounts, deleted users, and DISTINCT on user ID versus device ID. Run both on a single day to find where they diverge. Agree on one definition with the metric owner, document it, and publish it as a shared view or metric so everyone queries the same logic.
05
A new TO-BE process went live three months ago. How do you prove that the improvement actually worked?
Compare against the baseline you measured before the change, using the same definitions: cycle time, first-time-right rate, cost per case, backlog and customer complaints. Pull data from system timestamps rather than surveys. Check that the gain is not explained by lower volumes or seasonality, ideally by comparing similar periods. Also check for side effects, such as faster processing but more rework downstream. Present the before-and-after with the business owner, and note where adoption is still incomplete.
06
Write a SQL query to find requirements that have no linked UAT test case.
SELECT r.req_id, r.title, r.priority
FROM requirements r
LEFT JOIN test_case_links l ON l.req_id = r.req_id
WHERE l.req_id IS NULL
AND r.status = 'APPROVED'
ORDER BY r.priority;
-- Run this before UAT starts: every approved requirement
-- should trace to at least one test case.
07
A business tester raises a defect, and the developer closes it as 'works as designed'. How do you resolve it?
Go back to the requirement and acceptance criteria. If the system matches the agreed requirement, the developer is right, and the business need is a change request. If the requirement is unclear or the design misread it, it is a defect, and the requirement wording should be fixed. Discuss it in triage with both parties, using examples. Either way, close the loop with the tester so they understand the outcome and keep trusting the process.
A self join joins a table to itself using two aliases, so you can compare rows within the same table. A classic business example is an employees table with a manager_id column: joining employees e to employees m on e.manager_id = m.employee_id lists each employee with their manager's name. Another example is finding customers who placed two orders on the same day by joining orders to orders on customer_id and date with different order IDs.
A model assessing industry attractiveness through supplier power, buyer power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes and rivalry among competitors.
10
How would you forecast next quarter's sales in Excel?
Ask what decisions they make weekly and which three to five KPIs drive them. Propose a summary page with those KPIs, trends and one breakdown, then drill-through or separate pages for detail. Show a quick mock-up of both versions so they see the clutter and the load time. Use bookmarks or a field parameter to let them switch views without adding charts. Agree on the layout before building.
12
UAT starts tomorrow, but the business has not nominated any testers. What do you do?
Escalate immediately to the business sponsor with the impact: each day without testers delays sign-off and go-live. Ask for named testers with protected time, even part-time. Meanwhile, prepare so no time is lost: finalise test cases, check the environment and data, and plan a short tester briefing. If testers cannot be released, propose re-planning UAT dates rather than letting IT or the BA test on the business's behalf, because acceptance must come from the users.
13
How do you write a query to find users active in consecutive months?
Control conversion is 400 divided by 10,000, which is 4.0 percent. Variant conversion is 460 divided by 10,000, which is 4.6 percent. The absolute lift is 0.6 percentage points and the relative lift is 0.6 divided by 4.0, which is 15 percent. Before calling it a win, run a two-proportion significance test and check the confidence interval and guardrail metrics.
A model classifying features as basic, performance or delight attributes based on how they affect customer satisfaction, helping decide what to build first.
16
Write a SQL query to calculate monthly customer churn rate for a subscription business.
WITH monthly AS (
SELECT DISTINCT customer_id,
DATE_TRUNC('month', billing_date) AS month
FROM subscriptions_billed
)
SELECT
prev.month AS month,
COUNT(prev.customer_id) AS customers_at_start,
COUNT(prev.customer_id) - COUNT(nxt.customer_id) AS churned,
ROUND(100.0 * (COUNT(prev.customer_id) - COUNT(nxt.customer_id))
/ COUNT(prev.customer_id), 2) AS churn_pct
FROM monthly prev
LEFT JOIN monthly nxt
ON nxt.customer_id = prev.customer_id
AND nxt.month = prev.month + INTERVAL '1 month'
GROUP BY prev.month
ORDER BY prev.month;
Situation: two weeks before go-live of a billing system, a finance user asked how GST credit notes would work, which we had not covered. Task: assess and recover. Action: I analysed the impact with developers, found a simple configuration path for most cases plus a manual step for rare ones, and presented both options with dates to the sponsor. Result: we went live on time with a documented workaround and delivered the full fix next sprint.
Start from the questions to answer: how many users discover it, use it and later buy saved items. Define events such as save_clicked, saved_item_viewed, saved_item_removed and saved_item_purchased, with properties like product ID, price, source screen and platform. Follow the existing naming convention, assign owners, review with developers, and test events in a staging build. Build the dashboard before launch so data is checked on day one.
22
How do you calculate cycle time, touch time and process efficiency? Give an example.
Cycle time (lead time) is the total elapsed time from the start to the end of a case. Touch time is the time someone actually works on it. Process cycle efficiency is touch time divided by cycle time. Example: a refund takes 5 working days (40 working hours) end to end, but the agents spend only 2 hours in total working on it. Efficiency is 2 / 40 = 5 percent, so 95 percent of the time is waiting, and queues are the main target.
23
What is the novelty effect, and why should A/B tests run for full weeks?
The novelty effect is a temporary lift because users are curious about something new, which fades after a few days; the opposite, change aversion, causes a temporary drop. Running tests for at least one or two full weeks covers weekday and weekend behaviour and lets these effects settle. You can also check whether the lift is stable over time and among new users who never saw the old version.
24
Describe a BPMN model for a purchase order process where credit check and stock check happen at the same time.
Start event: purchase order received. Task: validate order details. A parallel gateway then splits into two paths: Finance lane runs Check customer credit, Warehouse lane runs Check stock. A second parallel gateway joins them, waiting for both to complete. An exclusive gateway then decides: credit OK and stock available goes to Confirm order and Schedule dispatch; otherwise go to Notify customer with reason. Using a parallel join here is correct because both results are always needed.
25
How would you decide whether to launch a new product?
Assess market size and demand, customer need, competition, unit economics, capabilities, risks and strategic fit, then test with a pilot before scale-up.
26
The CEO wants one KPI to judge the customer support team. What would you propose?
A single KPI can be gamed, so I would propose one headline with guardrails. The headline could be first-contact resolution rate, because it reflects solving problems, not just closing tickets. Guardrails would be customer satisfaction score after the ticket and median first response time. I would also watch ticket volume per thousand orders, which shows whether product issues are falling. Review targets quarterly with the support head.
Value chain analysis breaks a business into the activities that create value: primary activities such as inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, and service, plus support activities like procurement, technology, HR and infrastructure. For each activity you look at cost and differentiation. In cases it helps locate where costs are rising or where a competitive advantage can be built, for example in last-mile delivery.
Capex (capital expenditure) is spending on long-term assets that benefit several years, such as machinery, buildings or capitalised software development. It goes on the balance sheet and is expensed gradually through depreciation or amortisation. Opex (operating expenditure) covers day-to-day running costs such as salaries, rent and cloud subscriptions, and is expensed in the period it occurs. Moving from owned servers to cloud services shifts IT spending from capex to opex, which changes how budgets and business cases look.
29
What is operating leverage and why does it matter in business analysis?
Operating leverage describes how much of a company's cost base is fixed. With high operating leverage, such as software or airlines, a small rise in revenue produces a large rise in operating profit once fixed costs are covered, but a fall in revenue hurts profit just as sharply. It is measured as percentage change in EBIT divided by percentage change in sales. Analysts use it to judge risk, set break-even targets and stress-test forecasts.
30
Describe how you would model an employee leave approval process in BPMN.
Use one pool for the company with lanes for Employee, Manager and HR system. Start event: leave request submitted. Task: system checks leave balance. Exclusive gateway: balance sufficient? If no, end event that notifies the employee. If yes, user task: manager reviews. Add an interrupting timer boundary event of 3 days that escalates to the skip-level manager. Gateway: approved or rejected. Approved path updates the leave balance and calendar, then both paths notify the employee and end.
31
What is a boundary event in BPMN, and how do interrupting and non-interrupting boundary events differ?
A boundary event is attached to the edge of an activity and reacts to something that happens while that activity is running. An interrupting boundary event (solid double border) cancels the activity and takes the exception path, for example a 24-hour timeout cancelling manual approval. A non-interrupting one (dashed border) starts a parallel path while the activity continues, for example sending a reminder email after 12 hours without stopping the approval task.
First measure each handoff: waiting time, rework rate and volume, using system timestamps where possible. Then classify steps as value-adding, required for compliance or waste. Look for patterns: repeated approvals, information re-entered in two systems, work bouncing back for missing documents. Typical fixes are merging roles, adding a checklist at intake so applications arrive complete, parallelising checks and automating rule-based approvals. Quantify the expected reduction in cycle time for each option.
34
Write a SQL query for a 7-day rolling average of daily revenue.
WITH daily AS (
SELECT order_date, SUM(amount) AS revenue
FROM orders
GROUP BY order_date
)
SELECT order_date, revenue,
AVG(revenue) OVER (ORDER BY order_date
ROWS BETWEEN 6 PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW) AS rolling_7d
FROM daily
ORDER BY order_date;
-- fill missing dates from a calendar table first, or gaps skew the average
35
Your LEFT JOIN report should list all customers, but customers without orders are missing. Why?
A condition on the right table was probably placed in the WHERE clause, for example WHERE o.order_date >= '2026-01-01'. For customers with no orders, o.order_date is NULL, so WHERE removes them and the query behaves like an INNER JOIN. Move the condition into the ON clause, as in LEFT JOIN orders o ON o.customer_id = c.id AND o.order_date >= '2026-01-01', or explicitly allow NULLs.
Restructure it into levels. Create a high-level map with 7 to 10 main steps, then collapse detailed parts into sub-processes with their own diagrams. Move complex decision logic into a decision table rather than chains of gateways. Show the happy path first and handle exceptions in separate views. Use consistent naming in verb-noun form and remove duplicated steps. Finally, test readability by asking a stakeholder to explain the diagram back to you.
38
A query using NOT IN to find customers without orders returns zero rows, although you know such customers exist. Why?
The subquery probably returns at least one NULL, for example SELECT customer_id FROM orders where some orders have a NULL customer_id. With NOT IN, comparing any value to NULL gives UNKNOWN, so no row passes the condition. Fix it by using NOT EXISTS with a correlated subquery, or a LEFT JOIN with WHERE o.customer_id IS NULL, or by adding WHERE customer_id IS NOT NULL inside the subquery. NOT EXISTS is the safest habit.
WITH per_customer AS (
SELECT customer_id, COUNT(DISTINCT order_id) AS orders
FROM orders
GROUP BY customer_id
)
SELECT
ROUND(100.0 * SUM(CASE WHEN orders >= 2 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
/ COUNT(*), 2) AS repeat_rate_pct
FROM per_customer;
Tips to crack the Zerodha Business Analytics interview
Build and share real projects on GitHub, as Zerodha is known to value practical work and open-source contributions.
Read Zerodha Varsity to understand trading, markets and investment concepts in depth.
Learn about Zerodha's tech stack and engineering blog, including its use of Go and open-source tools.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; Zerodha interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Zerodha Business Analytics interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Application review (projects or GitHub); Technical discussion; Assignment or practical task; Founder or team round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the Zerodha Business Analytics interview?
This practice set leans on SQL for Business Analysis (9), Process Modelling and BPMN (8), Requirements and Agile (4), Excel for Business Analysts (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Zerodha interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Zerodha?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in fintech interviews like Zerodha's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Zerodha hire Business Analytics professionals in India?
Zerodha has large teams in Bengaluru. Openings and locations change often, so check the Zerodha careers page and filter by city and experience.
Business Analytics questions for similar companies