Interview with Qogita

Todo

• Go through notes you left about the code in an email
• Go through codebase to get familiar with it
• Prepare 2 new questions about Qogita

Questions

• What do you find most exciting about Quogita’s mission and the problems the company is solving?
• What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the frontend team in the next 6-12 months?
  • Performance
  • stability
  • rebrand of a website
• How would you describe Quogita’s engineering culture and values?
• *What is the next step?

Notes about project

• Excluded categories so i might be asked to add something like this

• I excluded ellipses, might be asked to add one

• I implemented cart with localstorage for simplicity and I used nanostore for state management. That works, but better solution is to have a user session and store it in a DB or persisted redis.

• I updated Next.js and React version to latest

• I added domain for images.qogita.com because by default, next.js does not allow to load in resources that are not coming from the same API.

• ClientComponent is required when I want to ensure that my component is rendered on a client, not on a server. With the newest API, use useclient

• I levereged suspense and error boundary to catch errors.

Final Stage (Behavioural)

• Prepare Questions

  • Prepare some business related questions to showcase strategic thinking to show that you are more senior

• Prepare Tell me about yourself

• Prepare why work here

• Prepare some Q&As (Can use II as an example)

• Research Qogita’s Culture

Culture and Values

• Own it - should demonstrate a sense of accountability and treat the business as their own
• Do it together - Ability to collaborate, support and learn from others
• Iterate quickly - Proactive, action-oriented approach and focus on simple solutions and willingness to learn and adapt quickly
• Know your shit - results-oriented, understand goals and curious about customer needs

Cultural Fit

• Friendly
• Collaborative
• Likes fast-paced environments
• Because it is remote-first, want people that thrive in such environment and are fine with ambiguity

Collaboration

• Best possible teammates
• will be asked about that

Ownership and initiative

• Responsible and proactive people

Growth Mindset and Adaptability

• Company is evolving daily
• Want candidates who are willing to learn new skills
• Thinking aoutside the box
• creativity
• Quick iterations

Impact & purpose

• Driven by impacting the world
• want people that acare about providing best-in-class service to customers

Preparedeness & Research

• They want to ensure that you know what the company is doing

Q:

• Does it mean that the company is looking for product focused person that focuses on business outcomes and users needs

  • Yes

Questions to expect:
Tell me about your current/last role and why you want to make a change?
What relevant projects have you worked on?
What is your preferred working style and how do you typically deal with changes?

About the company

• Headquaters: London
• Empoyess: approx 75, 12 contries
• Specialisation: Wholesale trade of perfume and cosmetics
• Want to provide a one-stop show for all products and have competitive prices
• Simplification of procurement process
• B2b wholesale platform
  • E2E logistics handled by Qogita
  • Browsing products in one place via website, sheets or API
  • Currently, focused on home, lifestyle and fregnance
  • Loads of different types of payments, including financing
  • Currently working in Europe
  • Reaching new buyers or markets and receive more orders
    • Sellers can filter out from which countries they want to receive an order from
    • Helps with export
  • Does not charge anything for listing products, aads or shipping.
• Automation of the whole purchasing/selling process. Acts as an intermediary in wholesale market

Competition

• Ankorstore
  • Europe, strong presence
  • Small business focus
• DropshippingXL
  • EU, SU, Aus markets
  • 30K products
• Spocket
  • US and EU B2b Dropshipping platform
  • Fast shipping, vetted suppliers
• Alibaba &Amazon business
  • massive b2b
  • Dominate in scalability and cross-border trade
• Pepperi
  • Same as Qogita, focuses on health and beauty
  • Offline sales tool and trade promos
• Pound Wholesale
  • Bulk health and beauty products
  • Regional in the UK

Key Differentiators of Qogita

• Algorithm based procurement to optimise cost, speed and supplier mix

  • Optomises speed, delivery and cost real life (every minute)

• Flexible pament terms and integrated logistics

Perplexity

• How algorithm works
• How it compares to other wholesale platforms
• How do they make money
  • Transaction fees: charges small fee for each transaction made on each platform
  • Revenue sharing agreements: Sellers may share a percentage of revenue in exchange for access to larger customer base and increased sales opportunity
  • Membership: Businesses using Qogita pay membership/sub fees and there are different levels providing with different features such as analytics, support priority etc.
  • Pay later for deferral fees

Questions

• What are the current goals that the company is focused on, and how does this team work to support hitting those goals?
• What direction do you see this company heading in over the next few years?
• What are the current focus areas for the company as a whole?
• What is the expected day I could hear from you regarding the outcome?

Intro

Hi, I’m Oskar, a Full Stack Software Engineer with 3 years of experience, specialising in Frontend development. I have a proven track record of building high-performance, scalable web applications using React, TypeScript, Terraform, and cloud technologies (primarily AWS). I’ve also worked with React Native, Next.js and other React meta frameworks, built design systems, modernised legacy applications, and developed new solutions by closely collaborating with both internal and external stakeholders.

Most recently at Pfida, I was a Software Engineer and apart from working across the whole stack (BE and FE), I led key projects: revamping our customer-facing finance application, building an internal admin panel, designing our UI Design system, and enabling tenanting/white-labeling. I also introduced BFFs, ephemeral environments, and contract-driven practices to improve team efficiency and collaboration.

In my spare time, I enjoy learning new things. Currently exploring Go for backend development and I’m always digging into the latest tools. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with Tanstack Start, Go, gRPC and diving into map visualisations to build a personal project: a photography trip planning app that will provide relevant information. When I’m not coding, you’ll likely find me behind a camera!

I’m particularly interested in the role at Qogita because I like your mission where you want to simplify a big problem in the e-commerce/supply space. I have worked in e-commerce in a past for 4 years and I understand how time consuming this can be for the business owners to analyse all the data, get contract/deals with suppliers etc. and I believe in the problems that the business is trying to solve, as they are tanglable ones! Also, I have worked in a start up before, where I had to wear multiple hats, collaborate with tech team but also internal stakeholders, get stuff done and Qogita seem to value people that can be trusted to delivery, are motivated, like fast moving environments and are collaborative, which aligns with my qualities.

Why II

My experience at a fintech startup has provided a solid foundation in developing software that needs to scale and it was a place where I’ve learnt quite a lot of things, and I’ve seen loads of good and bad things. The natural next step for me is to apply my foundation to more complex projects like Qogita, which I see as a logical step in my career progression.

First of all, I am impressed by the possition of the company and the growth. I like the mission of the company where you want to improve how the B2B wholesale market works and help businesses to connect with each other. I have a background in e-commerce and I have an understanding of how problematic and time consuming finding products for sale for a right price can be. The fact that you are building platform that solves all the problems from analysis all the way to logistics is really great and I would like to be part of it as you are solving a real problem.
Also, I like company values where you empower people to take ownership, collaborate, move fast and do not overcomplicate things, and that you put emphasis on hiring individuals that are knowledgable in their sector. That is the kind of environment I am looking for from my next role.

From a technical perspective, your tech stack aligns perfectly with my experience with React, RN, AWS which would allow me to make contributions from day one, and I like the fact, that I would get exposure to working with Native Applications again.

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

My key strengths include my technical expertise in frontend technologies, particularly React and TypeScript, where I’ve built complex applications and implemented design systems. I’m also strong in architectural decision-making, having led frontend technology decisions and established best practices that improved development velocity. I pride myself on my ability to balance technical excellence with business needs, always focusing on how my work impacts users and business metrics and I have a product mindset.r

As for areas of improvement, I’m continuously working on broadening my backend
expertise. While I have experience with Node.js and AWS Lambdas, I’m actively
expanding my knowledge of more complex backend architectures. I’ve been addressing this by taking on more full-stack responsibilities and collaborating with backend engineers to learn from their experience. As for soft-skills, my weakness is probably related to hyperfocus caused by ADHD, but I have found techniques to have it under control. Sometimes it is also my strength, because it allows me to notice things that others have missed.

How do you approach learning new tech

I approach learning new technologies systematically. First, I identify why the technology is valuable, read some case studies and how it fits into the broader ecosystem. Then I focus on building a solid foundation by understanding core concepts rather than just syntax. I believe in learning through practical application, so I typically create small projects to experiment with new technologies and I avoid tutorials as they give you perception that you understand something, but when you have to do something on your own, you realise that you haven’t learnt much. For example, when learning about microfrontends, I built a proof-of-concept that demonstrated how we could gradually migrate a legacy application to React.

I also use dev community by following key contributors, understanding open-source projects and how they were implemented. Good docs are important, but seeing real-world implementation provide deeper insights. I share what I learn by writing notes or mentoring others, which helps to reinforce my understanding. I believe that in every business good documentation about decision making is important, because it gives context to others on why it was done this way not the other as often there’s a genuine reason. Also, it helps to prevent siloing knowledge, which from the business perspective can be very dangerous, and I have experienced that before.

Why did you leave your last job?

Joining Pfida was a great career move for my professional growth as it gave me exposure to quite a lot of problems and I was able to wear multiple hats. After a while the team has run out of work and company started the redundancy process and made key people from our team redundant. With morale low and little active work for months, I found myself feeling unproductive. It felt like the right time to step away, reflect, and make space to find a role that aligns better with where I want to grow next. What I am looking from a new role is an environment, where there’s definitely more work to do, decisions are made slightly faster than months and months of meetings, and

What are you doing now?
I’m taking time to evaluate my next opportunity, making sure it is a right fit in terms of culture, engineering quality. I am also exploring short-term projects while looking for a job. Currently, I’ve been exploring map visualisations in the app and started building an application for my personal needs. Something similar to Roadtrippers and Locationscout for photographers.