NatWest Software Engineer interview experience

A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn and set up an initial technical discussion of about 30 minutes with two people. One gave a short company introduction, then the questions began without much time for a personal introduction. The other interviewer asked a dense set of questions on Java, thread safety, reactive paradigms, data structures, and cloud topics.

The atmosphere felt cold and detached. The questions seemed more like academic, low-level trivia than day-to-day application, emphasizing internal mechanisms over how one would use them. I was not prepared for that style, and when it ended I felt I had misunderstood what they wanted.

I was rejected after that round. I was mainly frustrated because the difficulty did not match what I expected from a real engineering scenario.

Location: London, England. Overall feedback: neutral. Offer status: no offer.