The technical part has four stages:

• Screening Q&A
• Live coding
• More live coding and deeper Q&A
• System design

Each session is preempted by a recruiter "prep" call. All of this was actually quite reasonable and realistic, with no LeetCode. The preps were also useful, perhaps even a bit too revealing.

Then, after about six total hours spread across several weeks, they start pairing you up with multiple engineering managers. These managers quickly become disinterested because your past experience doesn’t fit their ideal profile:

• Contracting roles? Instant red flag.
• Big data but not millions of users? Too bad.
• Internal platform in an investment bank? No, it has to be a retail product and not enough users anyway.
• Etc.

It’s all literally right there on my CV. We could have saved each other time from the start. Why even bother reaching out?

It appears the recruiters are gaming their KPIs (Revolut is famously driven by KPIs) that track interview stages separately.

Write a simple load balancer.

Implement money transfer between two accounts.

Design a hotel booking system.