I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at N26 in Mar 2026
Interview
It HR screening, then supposed pair programming session, system design, then cultural fit. The pair programming was a disaster, late interviewers, unaware and unprepared of their own script. They supposed to have shared a zip package with me the day before, I only got it 20min in the interview already. To make things better, I asked which dev env I should setup before the interview, and I got, with anything you prefer, then the zip they shared was a NodeJs project (???) + Kotlin + Gradle, depending on outdated JDK version. So interviewers spent most of the time pushing me to fix my environment instead of doing what we actually needed to do. One of the interviewers just kept doing doubting questions, like, are you sure DDD is like this, why you thing so, why you created classes with this name, is this following hexagonal? Are you sure? Quite annoying, which, what supposed to be a pair programming session it was a complete waist of time for me.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at N26 in Jan 2023
Interview
1st interview: company fit with HR 2nd interview: 2 Options provided i.e. take home assessment to work on for 7 days or live Leetcode. I chose take home to show my capabilities. It was a spring boot app to create a robot factory and they said something you would be happy to put into Prod but it didn't have a DB and not allowed to connect to one. I was too excited and over engineered it trying to show my Java black belt with design patterns. Don't do that! Follow KISS design principle. They pay good attention to that and rightfully so. I had a different frame of mind then and questioned the engineers' response to my tech interview. We went back and forth in the discussions on email. They were polite in doing so and I got convinced where I had gone wrong even though the solution worked. I actually learnt a lot from that experience and have landed my next job :) somewhere else. Do what's needed as complex designs make it harder to maintain. Also pay attention to thread safety. All the best.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Tell us about your experience as a Lead engineer where you work