Recruiter call to start with, going over the basics of the role and establishing a relationship. 90 minute Hackerrank phone screen, two problems. One was a logic based problem about creating a rate limiter, one was to do with API querying for getting results about restaurants. Final stage of 3 1hr interviews: behavioural, coding, architectural. Coding interview had a 3hr take home task prior.

Firstly, I would like to mention that any recruiters I dealt with during this process have been brilliant - really great ambassadors for the company. Karat Interview: - This was definitely the most difficult interview. - Doesn’t focus on your previous experience but seeks to gauge an objective view on your general Software Engineering knowledge and problem solving skills. - I was asked some questions about SEng and had 2 minutes to answer each. - This was then followed by a long coding challenge. - Feedback: Scored as Excellent. Coding Interview: - Given a challenge and asked to spend 3 hours coming up with a solution then submit it. - During the interview I took the interviewer through my solution. - Then the interviewer supplied me with a new requirement to implement. I was able to do so with relative ease. - I received great feedback from this interview the only point of improvement was around adding more logging which was understandable. Behavioural Interview: - Asked a range of questions about how I handle certain situations and what my career aspirations were. - I was asked to answer in the STAR method. - I received only positive feedback from this interview there was no negative comments given. Architectural Interview: This is where things finally went wrong at the last hurdle 😂 - I was asked to design a relatively simple system. - Diagrammed it out with ease on draw.io - Explained it fluently. - Afterwards the interviewer began to ask me some questions about my system. - I answered questions about load balancing, how to implement some things on the front end, some things in the backend and some things in the database. - At stages of the interview the interviewer acknowledged that I had answered his questions well and wanted to ask me a bonus question “that he knew might be going down in to too much detail” which I was able to answer fine. - All in all I left the interview feeling great that I had done enough to succeed. - Then came the feedback which frankly caught me completely off guard. - The recruiter called me with feedback and told me it had been so-so tending towards negative. - The interviewer had not acknowledged a single thing that I had done right the only positive feedback I received was about how well we interacted with each other. Which contradicted his acknowledgement of my answers during the interview. - Instead of giving me credit anywhere for the questions I answered well he focused solely on the implementation of the database and only provided negative feedback on that area. - Which was puzzling for me because we did discuss it at length and I offered multiple different solutions to the issue of potential race conditions and in the end picked the best one. - The interviewer however seemed to fixate on the first solution of using a NoSql mongo database which I later corrected by discussing using a database which allowed for Transactional operations instead, the solution I finally settled on. - The purpose of this interview was to solve the problem through collaboration as stated in the prep material - to see how you think and work through a problem. - So fixating on the first iteration of the solution really makes no sense to me. Overall I was left feeling extremely confused. Deliveroo said that because of this they couldn’t offer me the role at the level I applied for but would offer me the role for my current level if they had any open roles. Personally I believe it makes no sense to have a 1 on 1 interview with an interviewer who is at the same level within the company as the role you are applying for. Perhaps the role was already filled before my interview and I was just strung along. Who knows but I do feel like there was more to the situation than meets the eye given the feedback I received just simply made no sense especially considering the all the positive feedback I received from all the other interviewers. Perhaps Deliveroo should consider interviewing with a panel rather than 1-to-1.