Mobile hiring at Revolut: straightforward, caring, never-ending

Four years ago, Revolut had a mobile team of one (me!) and now we’ve grown to over sixty mobile engineers, or mobile LEGENDS as I like to call them.

Over the past four years, we’ve been refining our interview process to try to make it as smooth as possible, and many people have expressed an interest in finding out a bit more about the process before applying.

So without further ado, let’s dive in.

The hiring process in a nutshell

The interview stages themselves are pretty standard:

• CV screening,
• Screening call,
• Home task,
• Technical interview,
• Final interview.

But what you might find more interesting is our approach to these stages.

Our approach

We take nerves into account

First of all, don’t worry! We’ve all been there and we know that interviews are stressful. You forget things you can normally do in your sleep, you think of a perfect answer to a question you were asked… in the cafe after the interview has finished on the phone to your parents or partner… so frustrating!

This is all completely normal and we know to make allowances for nerves. We’ll also aim to make you feel as comfortable as possible. We are a nice bunch, and we won’t ask any trick questions — we’re just trying to figure out if you will be able to smash the problems we tackle every day on the mobile team and also try to see if you would enjoy working here.

We test for things you will actually be doing

There has been a trend in the tech industry towards having four or five rounds of interviews, each of which consists of a live coding challenge solving an obscure algorithmic problem, usually without an IDE, and with three or more people watching, staring, judging!

Imagine if your day to day job looked like that, nightmare! I’d need a stash of Kalms just to get through each day and would weep gently into my pillow each night whilst re-considering my life choices.

The reality is, that whilst this format provides an easy way to pass or fail someone applying, it doesn’t really give a realistic picture about whether people will be able to do the job they are asked to do, and also biases the process in favour of recent graduates who still have red-black trees fresh in their minds. I’ve been involved with software development for 20 years, and I’ve still never needed to use a red-black tree on the job. I did once use a combination of arcsin and physics to make a candle flame move realistically in an app based on accelerometer data though … cool!

Our home task and technical interviews are designed to figure out if you are going to be able to do the real job and solve real-world problems that benefit millions of users, not solve arbitrary problems.

Soft skills matter

I’m also a die-hard musician, and a very successful musician once gave me a great piece of advice when I was trying to decide between hiring one of two very accomplished drummers for my band.

“You’re going to be spending a lot of time together, so don’t just judge purely on technical ability, that’s only part of the job”.

Great bands split all the time due to interpersonal problems, and the same is true on software development teams: technical skills are of course extremely important, but it’s only part of the job.

We are looking for people who are not only technically strong, but also have great soft skills: are humble, ask for feedback, and are keen to learn and collaborate.

One of Revolut’s guiding principles is ‘Stronger Together’, and we really do live this: you can get so much more amazing stuff done when you have this attitude. The reason we have grown so fast as a company is we all look out for each other, help each other, and work together to solve huge problems.

Finding someone with the right mix of hard skills and soft skills is difficult, and our final interview reflects this: some of the questions are designed to understand how you work with different people in different scenarios.

There are lots of different ways to answer these questions, but usually, responses fall into three categories. There is a high correlation between the category an answer falls into and whether you’ll succeed working on the mobile team here at The Rev. My only advice here — answer honestly, not with the answer you think we want to hear.

Key requirements

We want people who are exceptional and can demonstrate it. Whether you have a computer science degree or not is far less important than if you can code elegantly, solve tough problems in logical and creative ways, demonstrate a track record of completing things you start, work well on a team, and have passion for what you do.

Try, try, and try again

Didn’t pass this time around? Don’t worry, some of the strongest mobile engineers we have at Revolut didn’t pass first time either. Work on any feedback areas and have another go in a few months. In the words of Albert Einstein: “You never fail until you stop trying”.

What does the day to day at Revolut look like?

The day to day life on the Revolut mobile team is extremely varied, but here’s a sample of things you might be doing on any given day:

• Release a brand new game-changing feature to millions of customers worldwide.
• IDE auto-complete.
• Pitch a new product idea for your team, demonstrate the benefits, and then have the whole team switch to this idea because it is demonstrably awesome.
• Google how you use that date formatter again.
• Brainstorm an architectural approach with teammates, that when implemented turbo-charges everyone’s productivity.
• Refresh your memory of Apple or Google’s developer documentation.
• Build a few beautiful UI-only demos with a couple of different technical approaches, so you can validate which approach is best before implementing in the actual project.
• Refer back to your design pattern book to pick the best tool for the job at hand.
• Change someone’s financial life for the better with your work, and get feedback from the user about it.
• Restart Xcode / Android Studio, it crashed again. (For iOS bonus points, grep your command line history to remember how you delete DerivedData like a boss).
• Explore Github for inspiration.
• See your feature being written about by the world’s top press.
• Travel to one of our other offices (Moscow, St Petersburg, London, Krakow) to get to know your teammates better.
• Visit Stackoverflow to see if anyone has already solved the problem you are working on.
• Coffee.
• Cover everything with intelligently written tests so you have a stress free release.
• Learn new skills from your teammates, and organize a knowledge sharing session with them.
• After work drinks — Malbec is a mobile team favorite.
• Go for lunch and spot someone paying with Revolut, using a feature you have just developed.
• Football.

Pretty varied! That’s why we use the interviews to see if you’ll be able to do the real job, and not just have you solving arbitrary problems.

Join Revolut

Best of luck with your application, and I really hope you join us to help us achieve our mission of creating a product that gives financial freedom to everyone wherever they are in the world and turns dealing with personal finance from a chore to a joy. Let’s do this.

Careers | Revolut