Overall, I found the interview process at Revolut to be very well organized and structured, which I really appreciated.
A special thanks to the recruiter I worked with. They were friendly, supportive, and even scheduled preparation calls before the technical interviews to explain what to expect and share useful tips. That made me feel much more prepared and significantly reduced the stress before each stage. The interview scheduling process was also smooth and convenient.
My interview process was supposed to consist of four stages:
1. HR interview
2. Bild It interview
3. System Design interview
4. Final team interview
Unfortunately, I didn't make it to the final stage because I wasn't successful in the System Design interview.
HR Interview
The first interview was a conversation about my background and experience, along with a few high-level technical questions. For example, I was asked about database transaction isolation levels and other general engineering concepts. Nothing particularly deep or tricky - just enough to understand my overall knowledge.
Build It Interview
This stage consisted of two parts.
The first part was a live coding exercise. The task was to implement a small warehouse/inventory service. While the task itself wasn't particularly difficult, it was important to think about concurrency and clean design.
One thing I really liked is that using AI coding assistants (such as Claude Code) was allowed during the live coding session. Of course, you're still responsible for understanding and validating the generated code, but I think this reflects a modern and practical interviewing approach.
The second part focused on technical questions, mostly around databases. We discussed transaction isolation, indexes, query optimization, execution plans, and similar database-related topics.
System Design Interview
For this stage, I was asked to design a hotel booking system.
Unfortunately, this interview didn't go well for me.
I don't want this to come across as blaming the interviewer, but I do think your experience at Revolut can vary significantly depending on who conducts the interview.
Both the recruiter and the interviewer during the Build It stage were friendly, engaged, and communicative. They created a comfortable environment where it felt natural to discuss ideas.
The System Design interview was very different. The interviewer spoke very little and was almost completely silent throughout the session. At one point, I genuinely wondered whether there was an internet issue or whether they were even listening, because there was almost no interaction or feedback. It felt more like presenting to an empty whiteboard than having a collaborative design discussion, which made the experience much more difficult.
One thing I'd also recommend future candidates to keep in mind is that Revolut appears to assign interviewers from a very diverse international pool, and they don't seem to take potential geopolitical sensitivities into account when matching candidates with interviewers.
If you come from a region involved in an ongoing geopolitical conflict, it's possible that your interviewer may come from the opposite side of that conflict. While this will hopefully never affect the outcome, it's something I personally think the company should be more mindful of when assigning interviewers.
I'm not saying this was necessarily the reason for my result, but given how disengaged my interviewer was compared to the previous interviewers, I couldn't completely rule out the possibility that unconscious bias may have played a role. Regardless of the reason, it left me feeling that the interview wasn't as objective or collaborative as the previous stages.