Did an onsite interview in May 2025 for the London office after being contacted by an external recruiter.
One thing that stood out during the process was the concentration of interviewers with Credit Suisse backgrounds. While I understand the firm's origins, every interviewer I met—from directors to engineers—appeared to come from that background. As someone coming from a more technology-focused software engineering environment, I often felt like an outsider to the culture being presented.
The initial rounds consisted primarily of high-level technical discussions with directors. These conversations focused more on architecture and prior experience than hands-on engineering, which is understandable given the seniority of the interviewers.
The onsite coding interview was where the process became more frustrating. The coding question itself was relatively straightforward, but a significant amount of time was lost dealing with the interview environment rather than solving the problem.
The role was advertised as a Java/Kotlin engineering position, yet the provided testing framework did not appear to support Java. The available options were Kotlin, Python and JavaScript. While I was comfortable working in Kotlin despite primarily using Java professionally, the second part of the exercise did not appear to have a Kotlin setup available either. The interviewers ultimately had me reverse-engineer the requirements and test cases from the Python implementation and manually translate them into Kotlin.
This created unnecessary friction and gave the impression that the interview environment had not been fully prepared for candidates interviewing for a JVM-focused role. It was difficult to understand why a role advertised as Java/Kotlin would require candidates to work around tooling issues and interpret test cases from another language during the interview itself.
I also noticed very limited female representation among the engineers I interacted with. While I appreciate that an interview panel is only a snapshot of a company, it was something that stood out throughout the process.
The overall interview dynamic felt noticeably more adversarial and competitive than collaborative. Several conversations came across as exercises in proving technical knowledge rather than genuine engineering discussions. Whether intentional or not, I often felt like I was being challenged rather than evaluated, which made the process less comfortable and less representative of the collaborative engineering environments I have experienced elsewhere.
Combined with the lack of visible diversity among the interviewers and the issues with the interview setup, the process left me questioning whether the culture would be a good fit for engineers who value collaboration, inclusivity, and well-structured technical interviews.
Overall, my impression was that the interview process was not fully aligned with the technologies advertised for the role, and that the culture appeared significantly more traditional finance-oriented than technology-oriented.
