I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks.

A recruiter reached out over LinkedIn and was generally pretty good throughout the process. They explained everything beforehand and between each round. A lot of the emails and scheduling are automated, so it can feel a bit impersonal at times. The first round was a recruiter screen, just chatting about previous experience, the role, expectations, etc., which was pretty standard. They will outline where they think your experience fits in their levels.

The next stage is a technical chat with an engineer, where you talk through a recent complex project in detail. Unfortunately, the interviewer wasn't familiar with the type of project I'd been working on and felt they were "too broad", so they asked me to choose a different example. I spoke about a complex task, but it was from earlier in my career. This then led to feedback stating that the approach to the problem was a bit naive. That was fair feedback, but not being able to use recent examples meant that it is not representative of my current abilities. It felt somewhat unfair since they have my CV and LinkedIn—they know the types of projects I've been working on and could match me with a different interviewer.

The next stage is either a take-home test or a live coding exercise, and you can pick. I opted for a take-home test. The exercise is pretty good. There is enough scope in it to determine how people approach problems and differentiate levels fairly well in my opinion. Unfortunately, that all came to nothing in the interview portion. You walk through your code with an engineer, and they ask follow-up questions about it. If I'm being especially skeptical, I don't think the interviewer had spent much time looking over the codebase beforehand. We mostly spoke about the bits that I'd shown on-screen as I did an overview at the start of the interview.

There then followed lots of questions about the JavaScript event loop, rather than the approach or issues relevant to the problem at hand. That was a shame as it didn't make the most of the exercise. I'll be honest, I used to know this inside out, but it has been a long while since I needed to know the intricate details, so I was a bit rusty. Realistically though, I know enough to be able to look it up if I need more info. Overall feedback was that I had passed, but they were likely to offer either SE3 or Senior Eng. 1. I appreciate I was a little rusty at interviewing, but not even being levelled at Senior was low-key a bit insulting since it would imply I can't actually do my current job. I withdrew from the interview process at this point.

Everyone was friendly throughout, and there were some good conversations. The recruiter was great and did offer to pass on my feedback on the process. There are clearly good people working at Monzo, but I think the interview process and maybe training regarding interviewing could be improved. I am under no illusion that I didn't perform great either, as it was my first interview in a while. However, I think the process was not set up to get the best out of candidates.

Tell us about a recent complex technical project that you had a significant contribution to.