What Is the N26 Interview Process Like? (Round by Round)

Candidates report four to six steps at N26 for engineering roles. The process starts with a recruiter screen of about 15 to 30 minutes. Next comes a take-home coding test on Codility, which is a hosted coding test platform.

Candidates then report a live coding round of about one hour with two N26 engineers, followed by a system design round of about one hour. The last reported step is a behavioral interview with the hiring manager. Glassdoor reports an average of about 25 days for the whole process, and about 33 days for backend engineering roles.

Quick Overview

Stage 1: Recruiter Screen

Candidates report a short call of 15 to 30 minutes about your background and your reason for applying. The recruiter asks about your current role, your stack, your pay expectations, and your location.

N26 lists offices in Berlin, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, and Vienna, so the recruiter usually asks which office you want. Job posts require professional English, and published guides describe English as the working language, so plan for interviews in English. Prepare the motivation question before this call with How to answer why N26.

Stage 2: Codility Take-Home Test

Candidates report a coding test you complete on your own time, made up of three exercises: one easier debugging task and two medium algorithm problems. Reported submission windows run up to about one week, and reported effort is about two hours.

One candidate reported dynamic programming in the test, which is a method that solves a problem by reusing answers to smaller parts. Another reported that the test did not require a perfect score to pass. Read the scoring rules in your invitation email, because they differ by role.

Stage 3: Live Coding Round

Expect about one hour of coding with two N26 engineers present. Candidates report algorithm problems at medium difficulty, run on Codility.

Describe your plan before you type anything, then state the running time and the memory cost of your solution. Ask about input limits and empty inputs early. The engineers judge how you work with other people, not only the final code.

Stage 4: System Design Round

Expect about one hour on a design problem taken from banking. N26 runs a mobile bank under a full German banking license, so the problems involve money moving between accounts. Candidates report fintech domain questions, and one report describes the round drawn in Figma, a shared drawing tool. The topic list is in What to expect in the N26 system design interview.

Stage 5: Behavioral Interview

Candidates report 45 to 60 minutes with the hiring manager or a team lead. N26 lists four values in public: Ambition, Collaboration, Integrity, and Simplicity, so expect questions that test each value with a story from your past.

"Tell us about a time you failed" is a reported question. Candidates also report questions on conflict, mentoring, and working under a deadline. Prepare short stories that name your own decisions and end with a measured result.

Rounds Some Candidates Report

Reports differ by role and by level. Some candidates describe a separate walkthrough of their take-home code with senior engineers, while others describe a final meeting with team members, by video or at the Berlin office.

Several senior reports describe only four stages in total, counting the take-home test as the first one. Treat the plan the recruiter sends you as the real list, and ask for it in the first call.

Timeline and Decision

Glassdoor reports an average of about 25 days across all roles, and about 33 days for backend engineering roles. Published interview guides describe three to six weeks from application to offer. Feedback after each stage is reported at about two to three days, but some candidates report much longer gaps.

Scheduling causes most of the delay, because interviewer slots can be a week or more away. Full detail on waiting is in How long it takes to hear back after an N26 interview.

Candidates rate the difficulty near the middle of the Glassdoor scale, at about 2.9 out of 5. About half of the candidates who rated their experience rated it positive. The frequent praise is a clear, well organized process, while the frequent complaint is slow communication between stages.

Questions to Ask Them

Every round ends with time for your questions. N26 engineers have written publicly about a backend on Kotlin and Java, more than two hundred small services, Kubernetes, and Kafka for events.

Ask how one team owns a service from the first commit to on-call duty, how a release is approved under banking rules, and which parts of the product your team would own. A specific question proves you read the engineering posts.

How to Prepare

• Drill medium algorithm problems. Grokking the Coding Interview teaches the patterns behind the take-home test and the live round.
• Practice design on money systems. Grokking the System Design Interview covers the databases, queues, and caches a payment flow needs.
• Write your value stories first. Prepare one story for each of the four public values, each ending in a number.
• Open the app before the recruiter screen. Interviewers reward candidates who have used the product they would work on.