Candidatei-me online. Fiz uma entrevista na empresa iwoca (Londres, Inglaterra).
Entrevista
Worst interview experience I’ve ever had. My screening interview was rescheduled to one week earlier without asking me, my emails asking why were ignored, and then I received an email saying I had missed the interview. If not for the email trail proving it was moved without my agreement, this would have reflected badly on me.
After the technical interview, I was told I’d get feedback by 4pm Friday so I “wouldn’t be left hanging over the weekend”. 4pm came and went, my messages were ignored, and I didn’t get an update until the following Wednesday.
When trying to schedule my informal interview, my emails were ignored for a week. Then a different recruiter contacted me, admitted they knew nothing about the role, and gave incorrect preparation information. I was told to prepare 2–3 projects, but no projects were discussed. For the final interview, I was told there were concerns about me moving from an operative to an innovative role. When I was rejected, the feedback was that the role was actually operative and didn’t align with my innovative goals.
Despite applying for an analytical role and being asked about a project I was most proud of, I was told afterwards that I focused too much on technical detail and not enough on client impact. I had been instructed to prepare 4–5 projects, but only one was covered in the interview.
My reasonable adjustments were ignored, and structured communication seemed to be a reason I wasn’t hired, even though I used a clear framework and stated my needs. A week later, I’m still chasing written feedback, despite being asked for feedback multiple times throughout the process.
It felt like they already had someone else in mind, and the whole experience showed a clear lack of organisation and multiple red flags in the hiring process.
Thank you for taking the time to share this. I'm sorry about your experience.
I'm speaking with the recruiters involved and working through what broke down at each stage. If you're open to discussing the details, please email me at d.stewart@iwoca.co.uk.
I'm Danny, Tech Talent Lead at iwoca.
Candidatei-me online. Fui entrevistado pela iwoca em jan. de 2026
Entrevista
Intro call with HR, coding screen assessment done via accelerate.io platform, then back to back technical and behavioural interview. The technical round was not coding but was essentially a system design scenario going over a long google doc file covering Database Schema Design, HTTP API calls.
Perguntas de entrevista [8]
Pergunta 1
1. Database Schema Design: We have a users table that stores a single address in its own columns. Design a separate Address table, then walk through the migration: how would you read the existing address from the user table and write it into the new structure?
2. Design the schema for a system with Books and Authors, where a book can have multiple authors and an author can write multiple books. (Looking for the Book, Author, and BookAuthor join table.) When deciding what to index, what columns would you choose and why? (i.e. primary keys, foreign keys, and columns you frequently filter by, e.g. author name.)
3. Indexing Trade-offs: What are the downsides of adding indexes? (Looking for: writes become slower because every index must be updated on insert/update, and indexes consume disk and memory.)
4. Concurrency & Lost Updates: Describe a concrete scenario that leads to a lost update. How could you reduce the probability of a lost update occurring?
Suppose Richard and Anna both edit the same phone number at the same time — one is adding an international dialing code while the other is changing the number entirely. How would you detect that one person's change is about to overwrite the other's, reject the second write, and inform whoever submitted second? (Looking for optimistic locking / version numbers.)
5. Transactions & ACID: Why do we wrap these multi-table writes in a transaction? Explain in terms of: Not leaving the database in a half-written state (atomicity / rollback), Not reading the database in a half-written state (isolation)
6. Relational vs. JSON Storage: What are the trade-offs of storing data as a JSON blob versus normalized relational tables? (Looking for: with JSON you store column names and all the syntactic structure inside the data itself, whereas Postgres stores that schema metadata outside the row; and JSON encourages data duplication because you embed relational data directly instead of referencing it via foreign keys.)
7. Schema Migration Strategy: After creating the new Address table, how do you safely migrate? Walk through backfilling the address table and then removing the backend's references to the old address fields.
8. API Versioning: The API currently returns a single address, but now needs to support multiple addresses. How would you evolve the endpoint without breaking existing clients? (Looking for: either a new endpoint version, or temporarily exposing both address and addresses fields.) How would you coordinate the frontend rollout? (e.g. first upgrade the frontend to read the new addresses field — showing an error telling the user to refresh if it unexpectedly detects multiple addresses — then later upgrade it to fully support multiple addresses.)
Candidatei-me por meio de recrutador(a). Fui entrevistado pela iwoca (Londres, Inglaterra) em mai. de 2026
Entrevista
Recruiter reached out and sent me the link for the online test, after completion followed a quick call from the recruiter to to qualify the opportunity for them and myself
Following on from this was a meeting with a current account manager to get a more in depth understanding of my experience.
Then came the final interview with 2 team leads with more situation and experience based questions.
Everyone who I came in to contact with throughout the experience was great and very friendly.
Callum was my point of contact throughout - very protective and quick to respond and provide feedback at every stage
Perguntas de entrevista [1]
Pergunta 1
How to you change your sales approach based on the customer your speaking with