I applied online. The process took 6 weeks.

The first interview was with an Android Developer around general Android questions to test my seniority. The interviewee was the best I have ever seen. He was positive, smiling all the time, and it was like a chat with a team member rather than an interview. I passed this stage. Next was the code test, where you only have 4 hours to work on an existing project. I passed this stage as well.

The next one was another call with another Android Developer to discuss my code test. The interviewee was not friendly at this time. I felt like he wasn’t enjoying interviewing people at all. He asked me a lot of questions, and I answered almost all of them. There was a question about Room where I explained the general concept of Room and its integration with LiveData and said that I haven’t had a chance to implement it in a real-world project as we do not need SQLite in the project that I am currently working on.

Finally, HR got back to me after a week saying that even though some elements were strong, my explanation wasn’t clear around Room and Dagger scopes. I am pretty sure that I explained Dagger scopes correctly. Also, I was the one who put them into the project; the sample project didn’t include any sort of dependency injection at all. On the other hand, since they don’t mention that Room knowledge is a must-have in the job description, how are we supposed to know that? I wouldn’t waste my time if they were clear about what they are looking for. A third-party library or API is not a principle of software engineering. I wasn’t expecting this kind of frustration from Monzo. I hope they will improve their process and be more transparent. Lastly, the whole process took more than a month.

There were questions about the differences between MVP and MVVM, Dagger scope, Room, and Android security. They also asked about app modularization.