Revolut New Grad Software Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected After a Concurrency Deadlock

I applied for the New Grad Java Backend Engineer role, base EU. The whole process was 1x OA + 1x Recruiter Screening + 2x VO (virtual onsite).

Quick complaint first: I applied in October, and the recruiter didn't reach out until late January...

The OA was on HackerRank — two easy coding problems plus a bunch of multiple-choice questions, including some simple algorithm questions and some picture-based IQ questions.

The Recruiter Screening covered the team and the pay. New Grad pay is a flat number, no negotiating — take-home pay is about half of what a New Grad gets at ByteDance in China...

The first VO had me write a simple load balancer — fixed size, picks a node at random. Just watch the edge cases, pretty simple overall.

The second VO opened with a transfer function, and you had to handle the concurrency angle. I used to work in security, so I'm not that strong on concurrency — I wrote a deadlock using a read-write lock and only caught it after the interviewer pointed it out. After that they asked a bunch of concurrency and backend questions: things like how a global bank like Revolut keeps its databases in sync across regions, how the database handles concurrency, how you'd investigate if a user reported the service was running slow, plus some terminology — what's DDD, what's CQRS. I could answer the database questions fine but had no idea what those acronyms even stood for. Got the rejection email a day later — every round before this one, they'd scheduled the next interview the same day.

Overall the interview experience was a bit rough. Both interviewers had accents that were hard for me to follow, and I could only understand maybe 70-80% of what they were saying, so communication took some extra effort. They weren't very warm either, pretty much stone-faced the whole time. I'd say my listening is actually pretty solid — I have no trouble talking with Swedish people, or watching movies with no subtitles.