GoCardless Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The whole thing took about three weeks and was pretty quick. It kicked off with a quick chat with the Talent Partner about my background. After that, I had two technical interviews. The first one was a live coding challenge where I had to build a dashboard that pulled data from a few different endpoints. The second technical one dove deeper into how I'd handle implementation and architectural choices, really looking at my thought process for new needs and features. The very last step was a behavioural interview.

The interview process was pretty good, with fast feedback and useful tips before interviews. The interviewers were also proactive. The coding round was a bit intense because you have to finish and run the app to show results; good communication about your thought process is crucial here. The final technical and behavioral interviews were typical, involving a code review, designing a system architecture for the same area as the code review, and questions about your background and handling different scenarios. Make sure you're ready to use the STAR method for experience-based questions.

The technical interviews are usually a collaborative effort where the interviewer and I work through a problem together. However, this time the interviewers seemed unfocused and didn't say much, which meant I had to pause often to make sure we were on the same page. Even though I got nods of agreement and they asked about my approach and code choices, which made me think things were going well, I ended up getting rejected. The feedback they gave showed a big difference between what they expected and what I understood. It seemed they misunderstood my explanations and didn't value the time I spent making sure my code worked with tests. Also, it felt like they missed the main point of a technical assessment, which is to see how someone approaches and solves a problem, instead focusing on just getting the code to run.