A recruiter reached out and went straight to scheduling a technical interview. Their interview process was pretty confusing — they used a GitHub Codespace, zero LeetCode, and it was split into two main parts.
Part one: fix failing unit tests. The project was structured similarly to a Spring MVC app, and it also tested SQL. I had to fix a few SQL queries and write the logic for determining reward points: "Build a solution that processes a transaction file, calculates reward points for each transaction based on the defined business rules, and stores the calculated rewards in a database."
Part two: use Claude Code to help write a few new features — things like configurable rules, a webhook, a spend service, that kind of thing. They asked how I'd guarantee exactly-once processing, and we also talked about whether to go with SQL or NoSQL. "Design a Reward Points Service that can support changing business rules over time. The key requirement is that reward calculation rules should be configurable and updated without requiring a code deployment. You do not need to implement every possible feature from day one, but your design should demonstrate how the system could evolve as new reward rules are introduced."
Basically the structure was: there's a transaction table with a bunch of fields, you read that table, and then based on the rules you write to a table and calculate the reward.
Overall it was pretty confusing — I don't use anything like this in my day-to-day work, so it was a bit of a pain to get up to speed on. The bug-fixing time was tight and I didn't finish it. For the second part I just used AI for basically everything and casually chatted with the interviewer at the same time. Even the prompts were pre-written. Overall it felt confusing and I really wasn't used to it.
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