I had an initial screening call, then a second call with 2 members from the dev team. I was given a simulated PR to work through. Far more relevant than most tech tests as far as they go.

I interviewed for a role with Santander Auto Solutions, which is mostly separate from the rest of Santander. The interview process consists of 3 stages: - Screening: a short chat with a person from recruiting, talking about the role, requirements and asking about your experience and interests. It's really just a chat so didn't need to prepare much for this. - Technical interview: starts with a simple coding task in Java that's completed on a shared IDE. It's followed by a bit of discussion around the implementation, potential optimisations and time complexity. This is then followed by some fairly basic questions around Java, databases and Kafka. - Past project: I had to talk about a project I worked on in the past that showed decent breadth and depth of experience. The one downside here is that they wanted me to do it without any visual support (like a presentation, architecture design or whiteboard), so they struggled to understand and I had to strip back the complexity to the basics and by the time they understood some of it the time was up and they were left with the impression that there wasn't much there. This ended up being reflected in the final offer they made which was disappointing. Overall it was a good experience and the recruiter was super friendly and helpful throughout the process.