Went through the senior SWE loop at Chipotle earlier this year (2026). The system design round was the most interesting part, so writing it up separately.
First thing to know: Chipotle is in a weird and interesting spot technically. They're not FAANG scale, but they're not a startup either. They process millions of digital orders daily, and the system has to hold up through the lunch rush (which is a legitimately spiky, predictable load pattern, not random). The interviewer told me they actually care that you understand the difference between scaling for unpredictable bursty traffic vs. scaling for predictable peaks.
The actual question I got was along the lines of: design a real-time order tracking system that customers can see in the app. Not a novel question, but the interesting part is what they pushed on.
Where they went deep: Queue design. They wanted to know how I'd handle order state transitions (placed, prep, ready, picked up) reliably. Kafka vs SQS came up. They seemed familiar with both. Latency tradeoffs. They asked what acceptable p99 latency looks like for a mobile consumer app and pushed me to reason about it, not just name a number. Failure modes. What happens if a kitchen display goes offline? How does the tracking state recover? This felt like a real operational question they've actually dealt with. They did NOT ask me to design Uber Eats from scratch at global scale. It was scoped to something realistic for their context.
For the senior / staff level, the bar felt like: can you design something that actually works under Chipotle-specific constraints, not just a generic textbook answer. One interviewer mentioned they're re-platforming some core ordering infrastructure, so they're genuinely looking for people who can think about these problems.
I was applying at the senior IC level. No formal L-level numbering that was shared with me.
Feel free to ask about specific parts of the round.