I applied through a recruiter. The process took four weeks.I was contacted by a Monzo recruiter about a Staff Software Engineer position with a salary of 150-180k. After the first round, they didn't get back in touch for a week. When I asked for an update, I got an email saying that I didn't do well in a subsequent round that I hadn't gone through yet and they were not proceeding with my application. I got back to the recruiter questioning that. Five minutes later, I got a call and a million apologies because he got me confused with another candidate and that email wasn't supposed to be for me. The recruiter told me that I did well in the initial round, but they would be considering me for a senior position instead of staff.

After they disclosed the salary range of 110-150k and what was expected from a professional in that position, I decided to proceed with the interview given my current position as a lead engineer with a salary of 120k.I did a live pair programming interview that went well, but I got a little nervous and didn't get to the very end of it. The recruiter got back to me, saying that I did well and gave me general feedback, mentioning my mistakes in the previous round. I went through another two rounds of interviews, system design and behavioural, that went very well in my opinion.

Then I got an offer for a mid-level engineer position with a salary between 78-110k, plus 75k in stock. I asked for feedback, and the recruiter told me that I did really well in all interviews, but they leveled me down because of my performance in the pair programming interview. I asked if the decision was final and if there was any chance of doing another round of technical interviews to level me up correctly. The recruiter told me it wasn't possible.If they knew I didn't do well on the pair programming, why did they let me through two other rounds? It would have been much better if they decided not to proceed after that, instead of going through two more rounds and making an insulting offer. There was a lack of organization through the whole process.

These were the worst interviews I've made so far in my career.

Pair programming: build an in-memory ledger that supports deposits, withdrawals, and then implement transactions with a rollback feature. 1 answer.

Systems design: Given that you have a music streaming service, create a service to display the top 5 songs that are currently playing in the service. 1 answer.