Nova Credit Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So I interviewed with Nova Credit, and honestly, it was a pretty bad experience, super long and felt really impersonal. It started with a take-home assignment, then a call with a manager where they tried to lowball me on salary which was a huge red flag. After that, there was a technical interview with a simple algorithm question about parsing JSON. The final round was a marathon of four interviews back-to-back: two were behavioral/project deep dives where the interviewers just read questions and barely engaged, one guy kept cutting me off. Then there was a system design discussion. Lastly, a final chat with the CTO who was totally disengaged, just scrolling his phone and reading questions without listening. They clearly don't care about the candidate experience. The whole thing felt dismissive, and the salary anchoring attempt early on was just unprofessional. I'm not moving forward with them.

It was a really friendly, surprisingly human interview experience. It took longer than usual, about 4 hours in total. I've always felt that just 1 hour to evaluate a candidate and decide 'yes/no' isn't enough time to truly assess technical fit, let alone cultural fit. I prefer to be selective about the companies I interview with instead of just interviewing with whoever reaches out, so the 4 hours for interviews for one company was perfectly fine. There were 2 system design sessions, 1 coding session, and 1 cultural interview session. I think the interview questions and formats were designed to catch more true positives and fewer false negatives than typical FAANG-style LeetCode problems.

The interview process kicked off with a recruiter screen, which was unusually handled by the CTO. This was followed by a short coding and system design interview. Then, a more standard recruiter screen took place. After that, there was another system design round, then two parts of a coding technical interview, and finally a presentation. Later on, there was a low-level technical and behavioral discussion with a product person. The process concluded with another conversation with the CTO. The interviews were surprisingly good, and the second set of technical interviews were unexpectedly collaborative. I've become accustomed to fake pair programming technical interviews that are mostly one-sided. All the interviewers were great, and feedback was provided frequently. However, the rejection feedback suggested my technical skills weren't strong enough, which makes me wonder why I passed multiple technical stages and the CTO's time was used twice. While the company itself isn't a red flag, they seem unsure of their hiring needs and their nod-and-smile approach might hint at a culture of opaqueness. I would have preferred an earlier rejection if my technical skills were truly insufficient.