interview process was well structured, transparent and genuinely enjoyable. The recruiter was outstanding throughout, proactive, communicative, and made the entire experience feel personal rather than transactional. Every person I interacted with was friendly, professional and clearly passionate about what they're building (except for the people at behavioural interview. They were completly disengaged and even yawning multiple times) Technical interviews are ok, nothing super challenging, they ask what you find they will ask in glassdoor. It is true they expect specific answers, and you can mostly tell that when you hear the feedback, I think it matters most to them what you missed than all the things you did or said correctly, just one of those "missing" things and they will down level you very quick. The levelling at offer stage may not reflect your experience. Worth having that conversation with your recruiter early rather than after the process because you cannot change it later. Ask what do they expect in very clear terms. But leveling is always hard, knowing how well will someone perform out of 3 one hour interviews is a guessing game, so no hard feelings at all.

Recruiter reached out over LinkedIn, and was generally pretty good throughout the process. Explained everything before hand, and between each round. A lot of the emails and scheduling is automated, so can feel a bit impersonal at times. First round was a recruiter screen, just chatting about previous experience, the role, expectations etc. - pretty standard. They'll outline where they think your experience fits in their levels. 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 asked me to choose a different example. I spoke about a complex task, but was from earlier on my career - which then led to feedback stating that the approach to the problem was a bit naive (fair feedback, but not being able to use recent examples meant that it is not representative of my current abilities, which felt somewhat unfair since they have my CV and LinkedIn - they know the types of projects I've been working on an could match with a different interviewer). Next stage is either a take home test or a live coding exercise (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 most 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 approach or issues relevant to the problem at hand - which 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 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 re: interviewing could be improved. Under no illusion that I didn't perform great either (first interview in a while!), but I think the process was not set up to get the best out of candidates.