Xero Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process started with a 1-hour HR screening. This was followed by a 1-hour technical interview involving coding on Hackerrank. The next round was also 1 hour, focusing on system design on Hackerrank. The final round was a 1-hour behavioral interview with the hiring manager. After a verbal offer post-4th round, there was a week of no communication, then a call stating the role was no longer available due to team changes. This was disappointing given the time invested in the process. It would have been better to have a hiring freeze beforehand to avoid wasting everyone's time.

It was a 4-stage process. First, I spoke with an internal recruiter about my values, experience, and what I'm looking for. Then, there was a coding challenge on HackerRank; it was moderately difficult. The engineer who supervised, Cath, was great and made me feel comfortable. The third stage involved a discussion with someone from a non-engineering team about my work style, past challenges, and how I handle conflicts. Finally, two senior/lead engineers interviewed me to assess my fit with their teams, focusing on my technical background, familiarity with their tech stack, and previous challenges.

First, there was a 30-minute recruiter screen. Then, a 90-minute live pair programming session where I had to add a feature to a .NET codebase. They gave me access to the GitHub repo and expected me to spend 5-10 minutes discussing my observations about the codebase. Interestingly, I was allowed to use Google, ChatGPT, or CoPilot for this round. The next round was a 60-minute behavioral and values interview. The final round was a 60-minute team match interview. The first three rounds were fine with nice interviewers. However, the team match interview had hostile interviewers who asked strange questions to undermine me from the beginning, like 'why do you feel the need to explain your career before software engineering? Software engineering will destroy your life, why do you do it?'. During one point, I was answering 'how do you learn a new tech stack and domain?', and the interviewer cut me off saying 'I don't believe you can do it'. One interviewer was hostile while the other just stayed silent, making it feel like I wasn't being considered even before it started. This interviewer had a burnt-out and antagonistic vibe. After this, I was ghosted by Xero. Following up a week later, I was told the team had found a match but I was still being considered for other teams. I haven't heard anything since. It's been 2 months since the third round, and I'm still stuck in 'team match hell' with Xero.