Monzo Bank Data Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

It started with a recruiter call, then a deeper dive into my experience with an engineer. After that, I had a take-home test. The take-home was in BigQuery, focused on writing readable, maintainable SQL that follows data modeling best practices. The technical round involved looking at a relational model you'd expect from a backend service and figuring out the changes needed to create KPIs and metrics from it.

The talent team and process was great. I really appreciated them throughout. The interview process felt pretty standard with an exception at the end. It started with a phone screen, then a background interview with two team members, followed by a take-home challenge, and finally, some final interviews. Everything was pretty standard and I really enjoyed meeting members of the team. They all gave great impressions of the company. However, one of the final stages I was expecting to be a review of the coding challenge. Instead, it was a really odd interview with a couple of scenarios put in front of you: 'This query isn't working' and a financial fraud data science problem. I didn't give them what they were after on these, but the scope of what you could do was very confusing. There is very little sympathy regarding it being an interview environment. Don't go on to try and solve the problem, my advice would be to clarify as much as you can. When I would ask 'Do you have any idea what is wrong regarding the output?' it was met with 'I don't know it just isn't giving me what I want'. Similarly, in the second scenario, you could suggest 'going to the back end engineering team and changing how this data is generated'. This wasn't ever a clearly an option. Either way, I have little doubt it is a good company to work for and everyone I met gave very good impressions. A shame on that last stage.

I sent in my application online. A recruiter got back to me in a couple of days, and then it took another couple of days to set up an initial 30-minute screening call. This went fine and was a good chat. After that, I was told about the rest of the process: a 4-hour take-home task, followed by another 3 hours of interviews. At this point, I decided to stop the process. This would have been almost an 8-hour commitment, which is way too much and doesn't respect my time. It's more than double what I've experienced at other tech companies.