Monzo Bank Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process at Monzo is quite structured and spans about a month. You get a lot of feedback throughout, and you meet many people, which is a plus. However, it doesn't allow you to meet the people you'd actually be working with, making it hard to judge team fit – it's basically a gamble on what team you might join. It starts with a recruiter screen, which is standard. Then there's a call to talk about a past project. After that, it's either a technical take-home assignment or a pairing session. The last stage is a two-hour system design and behavioral interview. It's an intense process overall. The system design part is unusual; they seem to be looking for a very specific solution using particular technologies (Kafka and Cassandra), rather than exploring different approaches. They gloss over core system design concepts like queueing, redundancy, and caching. The behavioral interview heavily emphasizes impact and products, asking for examples of your best projects, almost like an Engineering Director role. Apparently, everyone goes through this, which feels like overkill. The interviewers are nice, but the pressure is extremely high. I don't think the compensation justifies this level of intensity; they seem to want FAANG-level talent but offer lower salaries. They should probably add £50-75k to their senior bands. Given the pay and my experience, I wouldn't have accepted an offer.

So the interview was basically a technical one. I had to work on some existing iOS code and add a new feature. The goal was to show news articles, but organized by year, in a table view. This meant structuring the ViewModel to handle the data grouping and then making the UI layer support sections. It was pretty collaborative for the most part; the interviewer was nice and we chatted about how to do things while I was coding. We explored different ways and refined the code together. But then, near the end, with just a tiny bit left to finish, the interviewer just abruptly hung up. No goodbyes, no final chat, just gone. It was around the scheduled end time, so maybe they were just rushed, but it felt a bit off, not very professional. The actual coding task was good though, pretty relevant to real iOS dev work, but the ending was kinda weird.

It was a long process, but very thorough and the recruiters were quick to communicate. Started with the usual recruiter screen. Then I had a 1-hour session with a developer where I had to talk about a past project. After that, you could either do a take-home assignment or a pair coding session. I chose the take-home. Then, another 1-hour call with an engineer to go over my solution, discuss design choices, how I'd adapt to changing requirements, and fault tolerance. After that, a 1-on-1 with the lead recruiter who shared feedback from the first two sessions and hinted at questions for upcoming stages. For System Design, definitely listen to interviewer advice and brush up on DDIA, especially concurrency, consistency, and network faults, as they really dig into those. My SD task was similar to a common one but had a crucial twist that made typical solutions not work, so be ready to design from scratch, not just memorize. Behavioral Interview was pretty standard, just prep well and get comfortable with the STARR method, emphasizing the 'Reflection' part to show what you learned.

I applied for a Backend Engineer role at Monzo, which was remote. The first step was a recruiter call, which didn't need any prep. Then, there was an interview about a project I'd worked on and my specific contributions, where I had to explain my tech choices but without direct coding questions. For the third stage, I chose a pair programming interview over a take-home assignment because I didn't have the time. This went well, and I felt I communicated my ideas effectively. The final stage was supposed to be a 2-hour block with two interviews: system design and behavioral. However, the system design interview was canceled 15 minutes before it was supposed to start and then rescheduled, only to be canceled again the next day, and I received a rejection stating they were looking for more 'leader minded' individuals. The behavioral interview, which went ahead instead, was a bit odd, with one interviewer repeatedly mentioning their past experience at Google and Amazon, which felt a bit off-topic. I left that interview feeling unsure about Monzo but confident I did well. I was applying for L30, a mid-level position. It was disappointing to be rejected after preparing for two weeks for the system design interview and never getting the chance to do it. Overall, the interview wasn't technically hard, but I don't think it was a good fit. It did make me appreciate my current job's low-ego environment more.