Be ready to go over:

• Refactoring – Modifying your original code to accommodate new requirements without breaking existing functionality.
• Live Debugging – Finding and fixing issues quickly while maintaining a calm, systematic troubleshooting approach.
• Trade-off Discussion – Explaining why you chose a specific implementation path under time constraints and what you would improve with more time.

As a Software Engineer at Pismo, your daily work will revolve around building, maintaining, and optimizing core financial infrastructure. You will be deeply embedded in product delivery and architectural evolution.

You will write highly optimized code to process transactions, manage account balances, and route financial messages. This involves working with microservices, ensuring they are decoupled, observable, and highly performant. You will spend a significant portion of your time tuning database queries, optimizing message consumption, and reducing latency profiles.

Collaboration is key at Pismo. You will work closely with Product Managers, Tech Leads, and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to translate business requirements into technical designs. You will participate in architecture RFCs, perform thorough code reviews for your peers, and contribute to the collective engineering standards of the organization.

Additionally, you will own your services end-to-end. This means writing deployment pipelines, configuring monitoring alerts, and participating in blameless post-mortems when production incidents occur. You will continuously refactor legacy components to ensure the platform remains agile and scalable as transaction volumes grow.

To be competitive for the Software Engineer position, you must demonstrate strong technical foundations alongside excellent communication skills.

Technical Skills

• Core Languages – Strong proficiency in Go (Golang) or Java/JVM-based languages (such as Groovy or Kotlin).
• Distributed Systems – Practical experience building microservices and event-driven architectures utilizing Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS SNS/SQS.
• API Design – Deep understanding of RESTful API design principles, gRPC, serialization formats, and API security.
• Databases – Experience working with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL solutions, including query optimization and schema design.
• Testing & DevOps – Commitment to writing comprehensive unit/integration tests, and familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.

Experience & Soft Skills

• Proven Experience – Typically 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, preferably working on high-volume, transactional, or cloud-native applications.
• Problem-Solving – Ability to break down ambiguous product requirements into structured, clean technical implementations.
• Collaboration – Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Language Proficiency – Professional working proficiency in English, as Pismo operates globally and conducts international team collaboration.

Q: What programming languages can I use for the technical challenge? A: You can typically choose between Go (Golang), Java, or Groovy. It is highly recommended to choose the language you are most comfortable with, as you will need to modify and extend this code live during the pair-programming session.

Q: How long does the take-home project take, and what is the deadline? A: The project is designed to be completed in a few hours, but Pismo generally allows up to five days to submit your solution. The deadline is flexible, so prioritize code quality, testing, and documentation over a rushed delivery.

Q: How technical is the initial recruiter screen? A: The initial screen is primarily behavioral and focused on cultural fit, salary alignment, and discussing your career background. However, recruiters may ask high-level questions about your experience with specific technologies (like Go, Java, or cloud platforms) to ensure basic alignment with the role.

Q: What is the hybrid or remote work policy for engineers? A: Pismo operates with a highly flexible, remote-first mindset for engineering teams, allowing you to work from anywhere within your hiring country. Local office hubs are available in major cities like São Paulo, London, and New Delhi for teams wishing to collaborate in person.

• Prioritize Test-Driven Development (TDD) principles: When writing your take-home project, do not treat tests as an afterthought. Write clean, assertions-based unit tests. A project with excellent code but zero tests is highly likely to face rejection.
• Document your trade-offs: Include a robust README.md file with your take-home submission. Explain your architectural decisions, the design patterns you chose, and what compromises you made due to time constraints. This shows senior engineering leadership that you think like an architect.
• Over-communicate during live coding: Interviewers want to understand how you think. If you are silent for five minutes while writing code, they cannot evaluate your problem-solving process. Explain your logic, state your assumptions, and ask for clarification if a requirement seems ambiguous.

• Brush up on distributed transaction patterns: Be ready to speak extensively about how systems fail. Understand how to handle partial failures in distributed environments, network retries, exponential backoff, and database locking mechanisms.

Securing a Software Engineer role at Pismo is an opportunity to work at the absolute frontier of financial technology. The platform's scale and high-throughput requirements mean you will face and solve some of the most complex distributed systems challenges in the industry today. The interview process is highly practical, designed to respect your engineering craft by focusing on actual coding, architecture, and collaborative problem-solving.

To maximize your chances of success, focus your preparation heavily on mastering distributed systems patterns, perfecting your coding practices for the take-home challenge, and practicing how to articulate technical trade-offs clearly. Approach the pair-programming session not as an exam, but as a collaborative design meeting with future peers.

The compensation insights above reflect the competitive market positioning Pismo maintains to attract top-tier engineering talent. Base salary ranges are complemented by comprehensive benefits, equity options, and performance bonuses, varying based on your seniority level, location, and technical depth. Use this data to help guide your compensation discussions confidently during the initial screening phases. Armed with structured preparation, deep technical focus, and a collaborative mindset, you are well-positioned to excel in the upcoming interviews.