Revolut Senior Engineer: SQL and DSA OA, TDD ledger round, Digital Wallet design
The interview process was broken into 5 main steps.
Recruiter Chat
Usual intro chat covering my motivations for joining and previous experience with different tech stacks. Definitely prepare your stories and why Revolut specifically not just fintech.
OA
There was one DSA question and one SQL question. The DSA question was Tree Parent Search and the SQL one was very similar to Pessimistic Locking. Definitely practice the SQL because I wouldn't have but I saw a review on Glassdoor saying they asked them.
Technical Interview
The next round was a technical interview where I had to code a thread-safe account ledger. They put a big emphasis on TDD so make sure to be comfortable with that process before doing this interview.
System Design
This was a tough round where they asked me to design a Digital Wallet. I'm not sure how anyone passes this without studying it directly because there are so many domain specific concepts but the interviewer was nice so overall it was a good experience.
Culture Fit
This interview focused on projects I had owned in the past and the outcome of them. Having measurement results is important here. I think that's what they wanted to hear so make sure to have some kind of metric improvement linked to your project.
I received an offer three days later which I rejected because I got another offer a few days earlier for a company I thought was a bit more chill.
3 comments
How strict were they on the TDD part? As in, did they want a failing test before every line, or was it enough to show the red-green loop a couple of times?
Closer to the second. They wanted to see me write the test first for each new behaviour, but nobody complained when I batched a couple of small cases. Talking through what I was about to test mattered more than the ceremony.
fair play turning it down for a calmer offer. revolut pace is a known quantity at this point