What is a Software Engineer at Lovable?

As a Software Engineer at Lovable, you are not just writing code—you are fundamentally changing how software is created. Lovable is at the forefront of a foundational shift from code-first to intelligence-first development, empowering millions of users to build software using plain English. Whether you are stepping into a Forward Deployed Engineering role or an Enterprise Technical Support Engineering position, you will operate at the critical intersection of core engineering, product strategy, and customer success.

Your impact in this role is immediate and highly visible. You will work directly with ambitious solopreneurs and Fortune 100 teams to translate seemingly impossible ideas into real, functional products. This means diagnosing complex identity and API issues, building zero-to-one product features based on real-world behaviors, and shaping the technical roadmap of a generation-defining company.

Expect a high-velocity, high-agency environment. Lovable is a talent-dense team operating out of Stockholm and globally, valuing extreme ownership and low-ego collaboration. You will be expected to care deeply, ship fast, and invent new categories of solutions using AI systems that no one has perfected before.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparation for Lovable requires more than just brushing up on algorithms; you must demonstrate a deep blend of technical excellence, product intuition, and customer empathy.

Here are the key evaluation criteria your interviewers will be looking for:

• Technical & Architectural Excellence – You must possess a strong command of modern full-stack development. Interviewers will evaluate your proficiency in React/TypeScript on the frontend, robust backend development (often touching Golang or Rust), and your ability to navigate distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.
• Troubleshooting & API Fluency – You need the ability to dive into complex, messy customer environments. You will be evaluated on how efficiently you can inspect REST APIs, read server/client logs, and debug intricate identity integrations like SSO, SAML, and SCIM.
• Product Intuition & Customer Empathy – Lovable engineers are highly customer-facing. You must demonstrate the ability to translate ambiguous user workflows and pain points into crisp internal tickets and foundational platform improvements.
• Execution & Extreme Ownership – Operating in a fast, AI-led environment means taking projects end-to-end. Interviewers want to see your capacity to rapidly prototype, experiment, learn from real usage, and own your solutions from idea to architectural shipping.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Software Engineer at Lovable is designed to be highly practical, focusing on how you actually build, troubleshoot, and interact with stakeholders. Rather than relying solely on abstract whiteboard puzzles, the team wants to see how you tackle real-world ambiguity and collaborate under pressure.

You will typically begin with a short application form followed by an exploratory introduction call with the recruiting team to align on expectations and cultural fit. From there, the technical evaluation begins. This usually involves a quick live coding exercise to assess your baseline fluency, followed by several in-depth technical interviews. These rounds dive into system design, troubleshooting scenarios, and architectural thinking.

What sets Lovable apart is the final stage. Depending on the specific engineering track, you will be asked to showcase something you have built that makes you proud, or you will join the team for a 1-to-2-day workshop (remote or onsite). This workshop is a mutual evaluation: it allows the team to see how you tick in a realistic working environment, and it gives you a firsthand look at the company's velocity and culture.

This visual timeline outlines the typical progression from the initial screen to the final workshop stage. Use this to pace your preparation—focus first on your core coding and troubleshooting fluency, and reserve time later in the process to polish your project showcase and prepare for immersive, collaborative problem-solving.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed, you need to prove your capabilities across several distinct technical and behavioral domains. Here is exactly what the team evaluates and how you can prepare.

Full-Stack Development & Architecture

Because Lovable empowers users to generate diverse software, the underlying platform must be exceptionally robust. You will be evaluated on your ability to build and scale modern web applications. Strong performance here means writing clean, typed code and demonstrating a clear understanding of state management, API integration, and distributed systems.

Be ready to go over:

• Frontend Mastery – Deep knowledge of React and TypeScript, including performance optimization and component design.
• Backend & Cloud Infrastructure – Familiarity with building scalable backends (experience with Golang or Rust is a strong plus) and deploying on platforms like GCP, AWS, or Cloudflare.
• System Design – Designing systems that can handle high concurrency, rapid prototyping, and integration with multiple LLM providers.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Telemetry and observability tools (OTEL, Grafana), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and CI/CD pipelines (Github Actions).

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a scalable backend service that processes plain-English user prompts and routes them to multiple LLM providers based on load and latency."
• "Walk me through how you would optimize a complex React application that is experiencing significant rendering lag due to a large, dynamic design system."
• "How would you architect a secure, multi-tenant environment for enterprise workspaces?"

Troubleshooting & Identity Integrations

For roles interfacing directly with enterprise customers, your ability to debug complex systems is paramount. Interviewers want to see your "troubleshooting chops" across the stack. A strong candidate remains calm under pressure and uses a systematic approach to isolate issues in foreign or undocumented environments.

Be ready to go over:

• API Inspection – Using tools like Postman to validate endpoints, mock responses, and identify latency or payload errors.
• Identity & Access Management – Deep understanding of SSO, OAuth, SAML, and SCIM, and how these protocols fail in real-world enterprise environments.
• Log Analysis – Reading and interpreting server and client logs to spot anomalies and piece together a user's journey to failure.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "A Fortune 100 customer reports that their SAML SSO integration suddenly stopped working for half their users. Walk me through your debugging steps."
• "How do you approach a situation where a customer claims an API endpoint is failing, but your internal logs show 200 OK responses?"
• "Write a quick Python or TypeScript script to reproduce a race condition reported by a user."

Product Intuition & AI Integration

Lovable is building AI-powered software creation tools. Even if you aren't an ML researcher, you need strong product intuition regarding how users interact with AI and LLMs. You are evaluated on your ability to translate messy real-world behaviors into emerging patterns and platform features.

Be ready to go over:

• Agentic Systems – Understanding how LLMs can be used to execute multi-step workflows or generate code.
• Zero-to-One Development – Navigating high-ambiguity environments to build features that have never existed before.
• User-Centric Prototyping – Balancing technical perfection with the need to ship fast and learn from early/beta customers.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to build a feature with highly ambiguous requirements. How did you decide what to ship first?"
• "A customer asks 'why didn't the AI agent follow my custom design theme?' How do you investigate and explain this to a non-technical stakeholder?"
• "Describe a time you used an LLM API to solve a traditional software engineering problem."

Extreme Ownership & Collaboration

At Lovable, you will regularly talk to CPOs about reliability and developers about logs—often on the same call. Your communication skills and ability to take ownership of a problem from triage to resolution are heavily scrutinized.

Be ready to go over:

• Stakeholder Management – Building trust with enterprise admins, product leaders, and internal PMs.
• Incident Response – Prioritizing effectively when multiple high-value customers need immediate help.
• Creating Repeatability – Turning one-off fixes into internal runbooks, playbooks, and customer-facing guides.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "You have three enterprise customers reporting critical blocking issues at the same time. How do you prioritize and communicate?"
• "Tell me about a time you turned a recurring customer complaint into a permanent product improvement."
• "How do you handle a situation where an engineering team refuses to prioritize a bug that is severely impacting one of your largest clients?"

Key Responsibilities

The day-to-day reality of a Software Engineer at Lovable is dynamic and highly cross-functional. You will not be isolated in a silo pulling tickets from a backlog; you will be actively deploying intelligence into the real world.

You will spend a significant portion of your time working directly with customers to understand their workflows, needs, and blockers. For Forward Deployed Engineers, this means designing and implementing custom solutions that integrate seamlessly with the Lovable platform. For Enterprise Support Engineers, this involves owning white-glove support for massive workspaces, diagnosing the hardest issues across design systems, connectors, and project publishing.

Collaboration is a constant. You will pair daily with PMs, core engineers, CSMs, and founders. When you uncover a bug or a missing feature in the field, you will be responsible for reproducing the issue, writing clear technical reports, and occasionally jumping into the codebase to submit a fix yourself. Furthermore, you will be tasked with creating repeatability—documenting patterns and gotchas into internal runbooks to scale the team's efficiency as the company grows.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for this role, you need a mix of deep technical expertise and exceptional soft skills. Lovable looks for candidates who can operate comfortably in a fast-paced, startup environment.

• Must-have skills – 3–5+ years of experience in full-stack development or a customer-facing technical role (FDE, Solutions Architect, Technical Support). Proficiency in modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript) and strong API troubleshooting fluency. Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Must-have traits – Extreme ownership, calm under pressure, and a strong enterprise presence (the ability to tailor your technical communication to both C-level executives and junior developers).
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience with backend languages like Golang or Rust. Familiarity with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Cloudflare), and identity protocols (SSO/OAuth/SAML/SCIM).
• Bonus experience – Background in a founding or early-stage startup environment. Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic AI systems.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent the patterns and themes you will encounter during your interviews at Lovable. They are not a simple memorization list, but rather a reflection of the real-world problems the team solves daily.

Technical & Coding

This category tests your core programming fluency and ability to write clean, effective code on the fly.

• Implement a React component that fetches data from an API, handles loading/error states, and updates a complex local state.
• Write a script in TypeScript or Python to parse a large log file and extract specific error patterns related to API timeouts.
• How would you optimize a slow-rendering web application that relies heavily on a large DOM tree and frequent state updates?
• Implement a basic rate-limiter function for an API endpoint.

System Design & Architecture

These questions assess your ability to design scalable, reliable systems that integrate with modern cloud infrastructure and AI tools.

• Design an architecture for a real-time collaborative code editor powered by an LLM backend.
• How would you structure a distributed backend system in Golang to handle millions of plain-text prompts per minute?
• Walk me through how you would securely store and manage user-provided API keys for third-party integrations.
• Explain how you would design an observability pipeline to track the latency of different LLM providers used by our platform.

Troubleshooting & Support

This category evaluates your systematic approach to debugging and your familiarity with enterprise integrations.

• A customer complains that their SCIM provisioning is failing to update user roles. What are your first three steps to investigate?
• You receive a vague bug report: "The app crashed when I clicked publish." How do you extract the necessary information from the user and logs to reproduce it?
• Walk me through how you would use Postman to debug a REST API endpoint that works locally but fails in production.
• Explain OAuth 2.0 to me as if I were a non-technical Product Manager, then explain it again as if I were a Backend Engineer.

Behavioral & Product Intuition

These questions dive into your ownership, velocity, and ability to navigate startup ambiguity.

• Tell me about a time you had to build something from scratch with almost no documentation or guidance.
• Describe a situation where you disagreed with a product decision because of customer feedback. How did you handle it?
• Show us a project you have built that makes you proud. What were the hardest technical challenges, and what would you do differently today?
• How do you balance the need to ship a fix rapidly for a critical customer versus writing perfectly architected code?

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the live coding exercise? The live coding is designed to test practical fluency rather than trick you with obscure algorithmic puzzles. Expect tasks closely related to the day-to-day work, such as building a React component, writing a data-parsing script, or interacting with an API. Focus on writing clean code and communicating your thought process.

Q: Do I need to be an AI/Machine Learning expert? No. While you should be highly curious about AI and comfortable building with LLMs (via APIs), you are not expected to train models from scratch. The focus is on applied AI—deploying intelligence into real-world software products.

Q: What should I expect from the 1-2 day workshop? The workshop is an immersive experience where you will collaborate on real problems with the team. It is designed to test how you communicate, prioritize, and write code in a realistic setting. Treat it as a normal working day: ask questions, pair program, and focus on delivering tangible value.

Q: Is this role fully remote or based in Stockholm? Lovable is based in Stockholm, but they hire globally for many roles. Be prepared to discuss your working hours, timezone overlap, and ability to travel occasionally for team offsites or critical customer meetings.

Q: What differentiates the best candidates? The strongest candidates exhibit "extreme ownership." They don't just point out bugs; they dig into the code, propose architectural fixes, and consider how the issue impacts the user's business. A strong bias for action and an ego-free approach to collaboration will set you apart.

Other General Tips

• Show, Don't Just Tell: Lovable explicitly asks you to "show us something you've built." Choose a project that highlights your full-stack capabilities, product intuition, or integration with AI. Be ready to dive deep into the technical tradeoffs you made.
• Embrace the Ambiguity: In an AI-led, zero-to-one environment, the "right" answer often doesn't exist yet. During system design or product questions, vocalize your assumptions and show how you iterate based on new information.
• Think Like a Founder: When troubleshooting or designing systems, always tie your technical decisions back to business impact. How does this fix protect the SLA? How does this feature help an enterprise team standardize on Lovable?
• Master the Logs: If you are interviewing for the TSE role, your ability to read logs and inspect network traffic is critical. Practice setting up mock servers and intentionally breaking SAML or API requests to hone your debugging reflexes.

Summary & Next Steps

Joining Lovable as a Software Engineer is a unique opportunity to build the tools that will define the next generation of software creation. Whether you are pioneering the Forward Deployed Engineering function or owning white-glove enterprise support, your work will directly empower millions of users to bring their ideas to life.

This data provides a baseline for compensation expectations. Keep in mind that exact offers will vary based on your seniority, specific role track (FDE vs. TSE), and geographical location. Use this information to ensure your expectations align with the market and the company's stage.

To succeed in this interview process, focus on demonstrating a rare blend of full-stack technical mastery and deep customer empathy. Practice explaining complex architectural concepts simply, refine your API and identity troubleshooting skills, and prepare to showcase your ability to take extreme ownership of ambiguous problems.

You have the skills and the drive to excel in this high-velocity environment. Continue refining your technical narrative, explore additional interview insights on Dataford, and step into your interviews ready to show how you can help deploy intelligence into the real world. Good luck!