Interviewing with us
We like everyone who interviews with our team to have as stress-free an experience as possible, so here’s some practical information on what to expect during our hiring process.
The ‘phone’ screen
This is a 30–45 minute chat with one or two members of our team via telephone, Google Hangouts or Skype. We’ll ask a bit about the work you’re currently doing (or have done recently), and also give you an opportunity to ask about our company, the team, and the things we’re currently working on.
We won’t ask pop-quiz style technical questions, but we will expect you to talk about the technical aspects of the projects you’ve worked on. Some examples of things we like to discuss are: testing, deployment, build pipelines, infrastructure management & interfaces with other systems. We’re very happy to talk about personal projects as well as things you’ve worked on in your ‘day job’.
We also like to talk about your experience of working in a technical team, covering things like your experience of working with others on a single codebase, how work is prioritised and the interface with the wider business.
The technical interview
If you’re geographically close enough that it makes sense, this interview will be on site, otherwise we’re happy to do it remotely. All on-site interviews will be at Clerks Court, 5 minutes walk from Farringdon station.
The bulk of the technical interview will be a pair programming exercise with a few members of our team. There’s no need to prepare anything for this: we’ll tell you about the problem we’re tackling just before we start. We’re happy for you to use any programming language you’re comfortable with, but please let us know in advance if you’ve picked something esoteric!
The exercise is split into four 25-minute pomodoros, and you’ll work with a different person during each of them. There’ll be two of our team with you during each pomodoro, but only one will be actively working with you — the other will be observing.
If you come to our offices, we’d prefer that you bring your own laptop: we find that people are more comfortable with their own editor and development environment! If you’re not able to do this, please let us know when we get in touch to arrange the interview.
If you’re interviewing remotely, we’ll normally give you access to an empty (Ubuntu 16.04) VM well in advance, so you can set up any tools/editor config that you need. When the interview starts, we’ll connect to a shared tmux session so we can work together.
The total duration of the technical interview will be 2–3 hours.
After the interview
We try to give everyone a decision by the end of the working day following their interview, although in some cases we might want to arrange a further chat on the telephone.
We’re always looking for ways to improve our interview process, and we’re always happy to get feedback on it: please let us know if there’s anything you think we could improve.
