Tech stack
Revolut widely uses a homegrown framework across many types of projects. It leans engineers toward using Python to work around limitations and is more or less based on a CQRS-style approach. It appears to have been designed primarily for ledger-like web services, where it fits well. However, it becomes inadequate in use cases that are not ledger-like systems.
If you end up working on a product that is poorly suited to this architecture, you will struggle to implement changes effectively. You may then be compared to teams that don’t face the same constraints and be blamed for inefficiency.
SDLC
The entire company uses SNAPSHOT versioning for services, leaving very little room for version manipulation. This approach made sense during Revolut’s hyper-growth phase, but those times are largely gone. The company is getting slower at delivering improvements in long-running products, and the tooling hasn’t adapted to that reality.
There is no consistent OpenAPI (or equivalent) documentation for exposed interfaces and data structures. Documentation in general is sparse, often outdated, and frequently maintained by people who have already left the company.
As a result, engineers rely heavily on reading other teams’ codebases and contributing directly to them, which adds to the existing chaos. There is no strong mechanism for coordinating work across many teams, so engineers are often forced to contribute to poorly designed systems just to move work forward.
There are no architects in the company - this means there is a little planned orchestration between services, teams are creating ad-hoc one - which leads to misunderstandings, bugs, and low quality architecture between services (not to mention within services) in general.
Code reviews
Code reviews tend to focus on nitpicking rather than broader architectural impact. There is little time allocated for deeper design discussion, and this type of work is not reflected in quarterly performance reviews.
Culture
The company shows little concern for employee well-being, particularly by setting unrealistic goals. Revolut strongly believes in pushing people beyond their comfort zone, but does so constantly, ignoring natural cognitive limits. In practice, the company hires very strong engineers, overwhelms them with tasks, overstimulates them, and eventually burns them out.
Figuratively speaking, Revolut buys race cars but invests nothing in maintenance and never reads the manual.
Employees who have been with the company for 3+ years often normalize this culture. Phrases like “this is Revolut, baby!” are common. Many appear to have no work-life balance, few hobbies, and little emotional outlet, and daily interactions can become aggressive. The company language is framed as “challenging one another,” but in extreme form it feels less like collaboration and more like constant competition. Backstabbing is not unusual and is sometimes perceived as a legitimate way to achieve goals.
Senior management positions itself as unquestionable. “Ambitious” quarterly goals are not open for meaningful discussion, which leaves everyone disappointed with the results. Middle management rarely challenges senior leadership and instead focuses on pushing engineers harder, sometimes using emotional pressure (“I’m disappointed,” “I thought you could do better,” “why are you so slow?”).
One of the most troubling aspects is the relationship between senior management and the CEO. Nik Storonsky has a strong vision for the company, but executing it fully is extremely difficult. In practice, senior leadership often quietly ignores larger parts of that vision.
Turnover
Staff turnover is high. People who originally worked on your project are often long gone, and they did not design systems with long-term continuity in mind. Expect undocumented hacks, caveats, and legacy bugs.
Summary
You can work here, but if you are already an experienced, battle-tested professional, the environment may feel like emotionally charged chaos without a larger purpose. Revolut is very good at launching new features and services. However, for the reasons above, the company struggles with maintaining and evolving long-running products. It lacks the organizational tooling and processes required to support them effectively.
