The experience has been in line with the (low) expectations I had.

I was contacted for a Senior Engineer role. Initially, I wasn't sure I wanted to invest time in this process because I had heard about ridiculous recruiting practices and a toxic workplace. Meeting a good recruiter, though, made me change my mind and think, "Let's give this a try."

The first stage was a live coding session. The problem was quite simple; the critical part was to show that you write your code incrementally and test every single tiny case. They might also ask "unconventional" things, like writing a test verifying that the result of a method call is random.

The second stage was a "tech call" which involved more coding (extremely simple this time) and a few questions about DB (isolation, indexes), resilience patterns, and deployment strategies. I was told to be prepared with a solid theoretical foundation, but when I tried to go deep into these topics, I found that the expected answers were way more practical. This resulted in me wasting some interview time (which is a very important aspect for them because, more than the interaction with the candidate, it seems they have to fill in a checklist of answered items).

The third stage was system design. The interviewer gave me a brief and (intentionally, I guess) very vague description of a product to design. Even though there was some misunderstanding here and there, I was able to discuss all the requirements, propose a solution, answer a few challenge questions by extending the proposed design, and describe the provided API. In short, I managed to finish the task and felt there were no red flags detected from the interviewer. Plus, he told me I would receive feedback in a maximum of two days.

After that call, Revolut disappeared from my life. I dedicated a lot of time to prepare myself for these interviews (more than required, TBH), and this is how I was treated.

Even if, for some (unexpected) reason, the last round went badly, I will never know what that reason is. However, reading other experiences, it's possible it's not something I could really work on (apart from just increasing my luck).

On top of that, the "good recruiter" seemed to have let me down too because, after being extremely nice, empathetic, and supportive, he ruthlessly ghosted me.

If this is how they treat their potential employees, I can't imagine what it means to be an actual employee. Moreover, from the questions I asked various interviewers, I tried to understand if they were excited and motivated about working at Revolut, and from their body language, I got a subtle feeling that the opinion was, "I regret to be here."

Mostly things about concurrency and DB isolation.