To succeed in the Reward Gateway interview process, you must prepare across several dimensions. The hiring team values candidates who are not only technically proficient but also highly collaborative and aligned with their core mission.

Role-related knowledge – You must demonstrate deep expertise in your primary programming languages and frameworks. Focus on clean code principles, SOLID design patterns, and effective database management.

Problem-solving ability – Interviewers want to see how you break down complex, ambiguous problems. Be prepared to explain your thought process clearly, weigh technical trade-offs, and justify your design decisions.

Culture alignment – Reward Gateway places a strong emphasis on its values, such as "Be Bold" and "Delight Your Customers." Be ready to share concrete examples of how you have demonstrated empathy, took ownership, and collaborated effectively in past roles.

Pragmatism – The team values working software over over-engineered solutions. Show that you can deliver reliable, maintainable code quickly while keeping user needs and business goals in mind.

The interview process at Reward Gateway is designed to be practical, transparent, and respectful of your time. It focuses heavily on real-world engineering skills rather than academic brainteasers or high-pressure, time-limited live coding tests.

The process typically begins with a brief conversation with a member of the talent acquisition team to discuss your background and align on expectations. Following this, you will progress through a technical evaluation phase—which features a flexible, language-agnostic take-home assignment—and conclude with a deeper technical review and a culture fit conversation with engineering leadership.

While the engineering team strives to make the process efficient and supportive, candidates should remain proactive. Communication can occasionally vary depending on the hiring volume and team availability, so maintaining active contact with your recruiter is highly recommended.

The visual timeline above outlines the standard progression of the hiring process. Most candidates complete these stages within two to three weeks, depending on their availability and the speed of the take-home task submission. Use this timeline to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate sufficient time to polish your coding assignment before the technical review.

Take-Home Coding Assignment

The take-home coding assignment is a cornerstone of the Software Engineer interview process at Reward Gateway. It replaces stressful, timed whiteboard tests with a practical, real-world challenge that you can complete in your own environment.

Be ready to go over:

• Code quality and structure – Your code should be modular, easy to read, and follow industry best practices for your chosen language.
• Testing implementation – Providing a robust suite of unit and integration tests is critical to showing you write production-ready code.
• Documentation – A clear README explaining how to run, test, and configure your application is highly valued.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Containerization (e.g., Docker configuration) and basic CI/CD pipeline setups to show deployment readiness.

Example scenarios:

• Building a lightweight service that fetches data from an external API, processes it, and exposes a structured endpoint.
• Refactoring a provided legacy code snippet to improve its performance, readability, and testability.

Technical & Architectural Discussion

Once you submit your take-home assignment, you will join a panel of lead developers to review your code and discuss broader software engineering concepts.

Be ready to go over:

• Architectural trade-offs – Explaining why you chose specific design patterns, database schemas, or third-party libraries.
• Scalability and performance – How your solution would handle high concurrency, large datasets, or network latency.
• API design – Structuring endpoints, handling versioning, and choosing appropriate HTTP status codes.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Caching strategies (e.g., Redis), message queues (e.g., RabbitMQ), and microservices communication.

Example scenarios:

• "Walk us through how you would scale your take-home solution to support 10,000 concurrent users."
• "If this API endpoint started experiencing high latency, how would you go about diagnosing and resolving the bottleneck?"

Culture Fit & Leadership

The final stage of the process is a conversation with the Head of Development and the CTO. This round focuses on your career goals, working style, and alignment with the team's culture.

Be ready to go over:

• Collaboration and teamwork – How you work in cross-functional teams alongside product managers, QA engineers, and designers.
• Feedback and growth – Your approach to code reviews, both giving constructive feedback and receiving it.
• Remote and hybrid work dynamics – Managing communication and maintaining productivity in a hybrid work environment.

Example scenarios:

• "Tell us about a time you had to deliver a feature under a tight deadline. How did you manage technical debt?"
• "How do you handle a situation where a product requirement is ambiguous or technically unfeasible?"