Monzo

Backend Engineer Interview Experience

January 12, 2018

Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I applied online.

Two to three weeks after applying, I received an email saying that I would be a great fit for the role and was invited to a thirty-minute screening video call, which went well. After the screening interview, I received a take-home test to do, which was to write a web crawler in any language and with unlimited time. Given that I was unemployed, I spent a considerable amount of time on this to ensure it was perfect.

Next, I had a video call to go over my solution. It generally felt like a positive call, with the interviewer suggesting I had gone above what most candidates submit. A few days later, I received an email saying that I was not a good fit for the role, which was completely contradictory to my initial email. I asked for more feedback, and they said that I did not have the experience that they were looking for at this time. I am quite disappointed that they could not have figured this out from an initial CV screening and saved me the time and effort.

Don't waste your time applying if you don't have experience with at least a few of the technologies listed in the job description, as my background was in C.

Questions

The coding challenge was to write a Web Crawler in a language of your choice.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 45 interview experiences for the Monzo Backend Engineer role.

Success Rate

29%

Pass Rate

Monzo's interview process for their Backend Engineer roles is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive51%

Neutral16%

Negative33%

Candidates reported having good feelings for Monzo's Backend Engineer interview process.

Monzo Work Experiences

Pretty good!

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

Pros: Good colleagues. Awesome tech stack. Go is fun.

Cons: WLB can take a hit sometimes.

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

Pros: Good colleagues. Awesome tech stack. Go is fun.

Cons: WLB can take a hit sometimes.

Radically better than any other job I've had

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

February 2, 2019

Pros: I'm just not used to waking up in the morning feeling so consistently excited about going to work. Being surrounded by razor-sharp, hard-working people who are deeply invested (both emotionally and in terms of shares) in what they're working on is intoxicating. Management is light touch, empowering people to make decisions, and it works. Releasing features and seeing how our >1.4m users and the press react is very motivating. The company makes a real effort to look after its staff (and its customers) — there's a real focus on improving mental health all round. Really intelligent approach to remote work that works really well (eg all meeting rooms having video conferencing and a dial in by default). Plus the option of a month's unpaid leave each year, cute dogs, fancy coffee machine, yoga in the office on Thursdays are available.

Cons: It takes over your brain. Keeping boundaries is hard.

Radically better than any other job I've had

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

February 2, 2019

Pros: I'm just not used to waking up in the morning feeling so consistently excited about going to work. Being surrounded by razor-sharp, hard-working people who are deeply invested (both emotionally and in terms of shares) in what they're working on is intoxicating. Management is light touch, empowering people to make decisions, and it works. Releasing features and seeing how our >1.4m users and the press react is very motivating. The company makes a real effort to look after its staff (and its customers) — there's a real focus on improving mental health all round. Really intelligent approach to remote work that works really well (eg all meeting rooms having video conferencing and a dial in by default). Plus the option of a month's unpaid leave each year, cute dogs, fancy coffee machine, yoga in the office on Thursdays are available.

Cons: It takes over your brain. Keeping boundaries is hard.

Amazing place to work, fantastic people and impactful work

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

January 28, 2022

Pros: Tech – Engineering on Steroids Monzo's tech stack is really good. It's modern (Cassandra, Go, microservices) but that's just a small part of what makes it so good. Monzo has invested heavily in really good engineer tooling, – as an engineer working on product features you get so much out of the box, experimentation frameworks, logging, monitoring, auto scaling all just work. Our testing framework uses static analysis to determine which tests are relevant to a change, CI typically takes less than 2 minutes on a PR. Deploying a change is a single command and typically takes less than a minute. We deploy to production dozens of times a day. Culture The company is arranged as a collection of squads that belong to collectives (departments composed of squads with similar focus e.g. Borrowing Collective includes squads for all lending products). These squads contain people from all the different disciplines needed to own that area, engineers, designers, product managers, user researchers, product testers etc. A squad is then given a lot of trust and autonomy to really own the direction of a product. At Monzo you aren't just an engineer implementing changes that "management" has decided should be made, you are part of a small team that is empowered to drive the decisions about what we should do. Transparency – the company is really transparent internally, anyone can see the month by month financial performance of the business, read the strategy docs for other parts of the business and generally just be informed about what is going on.

Cons: So much information Transparency is great but you have to be disciplined about what information you want to expose yourself to. There is so much going on that trying to keep up with everything is a full time job. Work/Life balance You work with some excellent peers and are challenged to perform at a very high level. Sometimes you can get a little burnt out. The company is pretty good at handling this (you can take a mental health day, and that's not just something in a procedure that no one actually uses – people do take them). Pressures of being pre-profit Monzo is not yet profitable. The company is on a really strong trajectory but need to keep that up until we reach profitability. Whilst we are pre-profit we have to work predominantly on projects that generate us value (revenue) as well as being valuable to our customers. We have to be quite restricted on the time we can spend on projects that add customer value but don't generate any revenue. We do still work on these things but for every one we work on there are 5 more we'd love to be able to ship.

Amazing place to work, fantastic people and impactful work

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

January 28, 2022

Pros: Tech – Engineering on Steroids Monzo's tech stack is really good. It's modern (Cassandra, Go, microservices) but that's just a small part of what makes it so good. Monzo has invested heavily in really good engineer tooling, – as an engineer working on product features you get so much out of the box, experimentation frameworks, logging, monitoring, auto scaling all just work. Our testing framework uses static analysis to determine which tests are relevant to a change, CI typically takes less than 2 minutes on a PR. Deploying a change is a single command and typically takes less than a minute. We deploy to production dozens of times a day. Culture The company is arranged as a collection of squads that belong to collectives (departments composed of squads with similar focus e.g. Borrowing Collective includes squads for all lending products). These squads contain people from all the different disciplines needed to own that area, engineers, designers, product managers, user researchers, product testers etc. A squad is then given a lot of trust and autonomy to really own the direction of a product. At Monzo you aren't just an engineer implementing changes that "management" has decided should be made, you are part of a small team that is empowered to drive the decisions about what we should do. Transparency – the company is really transparent internally, anyone can see the month by month financial performance of the business, read the strategy docs for other parts of the business and generally just be informed about what is going on.

Cons: So much information Transparency is great but you have to be disciplined about what information you want to expose yourself to. There is so much going on that trying to keep up with everything is a full time job. Work/Life balance You work with some excellent peers and are challenged to perform at a very high level. Sometimes you can get a little burnt out. The company is pretty good at handling this (you can take a mental health day, and that's not just something in a procedure that no one actually uses – people do take them). Pressures of being pre-profit Monzo is not yet profitable. The company is on a really strong trajectory but need to keep that up until we reach profitability. Whilst we are pre-profit we have to work predominantly on projects that generate us value (revenue) as well as being valuable to our customers. We have to be quite restricted on the time we can spend on projects that add customer value but don't generate any revenue. We do still work on these things but for every one we work on there are 5 more we'd love to be able to ship.

Pretty good!

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

Pros: Good colleagues. Awesome tech stack. Go is fun.

Cons: WLB can take a hit sometimes.

5.0
Pretty good!
Backend Engineer • Current Employee
London, England
March 16, 2024
Pros: Good colleagues. Awesome tech stack. Go is fun.
Cons: WLB can take a hit sometimes.

Radically better than any other job I've had

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

February 2, 2019

Pros: I'm just not used to waking up in the morning feeling so consistently excited about going to work. Being surrounded by razor-sharp, hard-working people who are deeply invested (both emotionally and in terms of shares) in what they're working on is intoxicating. Management is light touch, empowering people to make decisions, and it works. Releasing features and seeing how our >1.4m users and the press react is very motivating. The company makes a real effort to look after its staff (and its customers) — there's a real focus on improving mental health all round. Really intelligent approach to remote work that works really well (eg all meeting rooms having video conferencing and a dial in by default). Plus the option of a month's unpaid leave each year, cute dogs, fancy coffee machine, yoga in the office on Thursdays are available.

Cons: It takes over your brain. Keeping boundaries is hard.

5.0
Radically better than any other job I've had
Backend Engineer • Current Employee
London, England
February 2, 2019
Pros: I'm just not used to waking up in the morning feeling so consistently excited about going to work. Being surrounded by razor-sharp, hard-working people who are deeply invested (both emotionally and in terms of shares) in what they're working on is intoxicating. Management is light touch, empowering people to make decisions, and it works. Releasing features and seeing how our >1.4m users and the press react is very motivating. The company makes a real effort to look after its staff (and its customers) — there's a real focus on improving mental health all round. Really intelligent approach to remote work that works really well (eg all meeting rooms having video conferencing and a dial in by default). Plus the option of a month's unpaid leave each year, cute dogs, fancy coffee machine, yoga in the office on Thursdays are available.
Cons: It takes over your brain. Keeping boundaries is hard.

Amazing place to work, fantastic people and impactful work

Backend Engineer • Current Employee

London, England

January 28, 2022

Pros: Tech – Engineering on Steroids Monzo's tech stack is really good. It's modern (Cassandra, Go, microservices) but that's just a small part of what makes it so good. Monzo has invested heavily in really good engineer tooling, – as an engineer working on product features you get so much out of the box, experimentation frameworks, logging, monitoring, auto scaling all just work. Our testing framework uses static analysis to determine which tests are relevant to a change, CI typically takes less than 2 minutes on a PR. Deploying a change is a single command and typically takes less than a minute. We deploy to production dozens of times a day. Culture The company is arranged as a collection of squads that belong to collectives (departments composed of squads with similar focus e.g. Borrowing Collective includes squads for all lending products). These squads contain people from all the different disciplines needed to own that area, engineers, designers, product managers, user researchers, product testers etc. A squad is then given a lot of trust and autonomy to really own the direction of a product. At Monzo you aren't just an engineer implementing changes that "management" has decided should be made, you are part of a small team that is empowered to drive the decisions about what we should do. Transparency – the company is really transparent internally, anyone can see the month by month financial performance of the business, read the strategy docs for other parts of the business and generally just be informed about what is going on.

Cons: So much information Transparency is great but you have to be disciplined about what information you want to expose yourself to. There is so much going on that trying to keep up with everything is a full time job. Work/Life balance You work with some excellent peers and are challenged to perform at a very high level. Sometimes you can get a little burnt out. The company is pretty good at handling this (you can take a mental health day, and that's not just something in a procedure that no one actually uses – people do take them). Pressures of being pre-profit Monzo is not yet profitable. The company is on a really strong trajectory but need to keep that up until we reach profitability. Whilst we are pre-profit we have to work predominantly on projects that generate us value (revenue) as well as being valuable to our customers. We have to be quite restricted on the time we can spend on projects that add customer value but don't generate any revenue. We do still work on these things but for every one we work on there are 5 more we'd love to be able to ship.

5.0
Amazing place to work, fantastic people and impactful work
Backend Engineer • Current Employee
London, England
January 28, 2022
Pros: Tech – Engineering on Steroids Monzo's tech stack is really good. It's modern (Cassandra, Go, microservices) but that's just a small part of what makes it so good. Monzo has invested heavily in really good engineer tooling, – as an engineer working on product features you get so much out of the box, experimentation frameworks, logging, monitoring, auto scaling all just work. Our testing framework uses static analysis to determine which tests are relevant to a change, CI typically takes less than 2 minutes on a PR. Deploying a change is a single command and typically takes less than a minute. We deploy to production dozens of times a day. Culture The company is arranged as a collection of squads that belong to collectives (departments composed of squads with similar focus e.g. Borrowing Collective includes squads for all lending products). These squads contain people from all the different disciplines needed to own that area, engineers, designers, product managers, user researchers, product testers etc. A squad is then given a lot of trust and autonomy to really own the direction of a product. At Monzo you aren't just an engineer implementing changes that "management" has decided should be made, you are part of a small team that is empowered to drive the decisions about what we should do. Transparency – the company is really transparent internally, anyone can see the month by month financial performance of the business, read the strategy docs for other parts of the business and generally just be informed about what is going on.
Cons: So much information Transparency is great but you have to be disciplined about what information you want to expose yourself to. There is so much going on that trying to keep up with everything is a full time job. Work/Life balance You work with some excellent peers and are challenged to perform at a very high level. Sometimes you can get a little burnt out. The company is pretty good at handling this (you can take a mental health day, and that's not just something in a procedure that no one actually uses – people do take them). Pressures of being pre-profit Monzo is not yet profitable. The company is on a really strong trajectory but need to keep that up until we reach profitability. Whilst we are pre-profit we have to work predominantly on projects that generate us value (revenue) as well as being valuable to our customers. We have to be quite restricted on the time we can spend on projects that add customer value but don't generate any revenue. We do still work on these things but for every one we work on there are 5 more we'd love to be able to ship.

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