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Senior Backend Engineer Interview Experience

June 25, 2021
Negative ExperienceGot Offer

Process

The process took 2 weeks. The interview process was completely rubbish, starting with the recruiter emails. Why do they need to add so many emojis to their emails? Okay, that might be just me being grumpy :)

Technical interview: first you need to create a web crawler to parse links and only for a particular domain and return a list of the links that were found. The idea is to see how you would implement it concurrently. So you should expect to spend the entire 45 minutes of the following conversation to talk about your decision (e.g., why did you use recursion? Why not? And so on). On that interview the interviewer was a jerky. He did not want to understand and test my skills, but rather prove to himself how good he is and how he knows stuff. It seems that didn't happen just to me. You can read other reviews here as well. Unless we had bad luck to be interviewed by the same person, perhaps that's part of their culture. An example of that: he asked a lot of questions, and I clearly did not answer exactly the way he wanted. He kept pushing me to answer what he wanted, and at the end, he used to explain how he would do it, even though my answers were not wrong at all. I know my stuff! Yes, you read it right. It seemed that he was interviewing himself!

After 5 minutes on the call, I noticed a lot of bad patterns and decided that I would leave the process and not proceed. I am in this industry for a long time, and I interviewed so many people that I could recognize it easily. So I did it; I was invited to the next round of interviews and said that I did not want to continue. My suggestion is to save yourself some time and avoid this company. I did some research on the LinkedIn of some employees, and some of them seemed to not take the company seriously enough and have some jokes about bugs in their job description. Also, if you do some searches about Monzo on YouTube, you might see some opinions about the future of the company from the money £££ perspective, which was a huge red flag to me as well ;)

Questions

Create a web crawler in Go.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 10 interview experiences for the Monzo Senior Backend Engineer role.

Success Rate

20%
Pass Rate

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

Experience Rating

Positive30%
Neutral30%
Negative40%

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

Monzo Work Experiences