I applied through a recruiter, and the process took 3 weeks.

It is worth noting that in my case I initially failed the technical test for a similar role and found the feedback regarding my solution very valuable. I was later contacted by a recruiter, presumably because they still had my CV on file and a more suitable role had come up. There were 3 stages to the process, or 4 stages if you count the phone screen. After the initial phone call with the recruiter, they sent me a technical test, which was a take-home style C# .NET test. They inform you that there is no real time limit to submitting your solution, however, as expected, you need to complete it within a reasonable time. Once they reviewed my submission and were happy with your solution, I moved on to the technical interview, which I decided to do remotely.

The technical interview was conducted by two lead engineers in the domain who I now work with. After the friendly small talk, the interview was focused heavily on my approach to the technical test—questions about why I chose to do things a certain way, what could I have done better if I had more time, etc. I basically did a code walkthrough of my solution. They also provided some constructive feedback on refactoring and improvements. The other questions focused on my prior experience, tools, and projects I've worked on. After being hit with a few challenging questions, overall I felt that the interview was positive, engaging, and not intimidating. I highly suggest that you don't simply copy and paste code snippets you find online, especially if you are unable to explain the code that you've wrote.

The next stage was a cultural or team fit interview with the People Leads, who are managers. I decided to do this one in person, as this was pre-COVID lockdown. This interview felt very much like a conversation amongst friends, where I got asked basic questions about myself and my career so far. They gave me certain scenarios based in a working environment and asked me how I would respond to them or what action I would take. Xero are very big on their company values, so rightfully so there was a question or two about my alignment with those values. The people leads were very friendly and were open to the questions I posed to them, and the conversation overall felt natural. I appreciated that at the end of the interview I got some honest feedback about how it all went and that I would hear back from them soon. I have heard that some roles require you to do an additional stage where the interview is conducted by your potential future team members.

Questions regarding my solution were around why I chose dependency injection for some libraries. How did some of the object mapping work, and what was my choice of ORM? They questioned my approach to refactoring, my unit test coverage, and how again I could improve it. There were questions around microservice architecture and AWS Lambda, as I mentioned I've worked with them previously.