Stage 1 - Take home assignment: Java codebase take home assignment on github. Stage 2 - 30 min "culture" interview (online): Culture interview - “tell me about yourself” and “tell me a time when you” kind of questions. Stage 3 - Assessment day (PortSwigger HQ, Knutsford) This consisted of 5 rounds, lasting from 9AM until 4PM on the same day. Round 1 - Pair programming - 01:30 hrs: I was paired with a senior engineer for this, and was given access to Claude Code. An extensive codebase was presented on which I had to add features that the senior engineer wants us to implement. It was not DSA based tho. Round 2 - Group activity - 30min: I was teamed up with other candidates in a group of 4, and all of us were given a list of scattered information. Our job was to collect and organize the information, and work together to achieve a goal. The culture team was overlooking at our performance. Round 3 - Pair problem solving - 30min: I was paired with another candidate and was given a puzzle to solve. Round 4 - Culture interview - 45mins: I went to have a conversation with a senior employee. Was all about culture related questions. Round 5 - SwigFactor interview (culture oriented) - 45mins: Another extensive round to talk about culture, as they tested how much of a fit I am to PortSwigger.

Mostly focused on interpersonal skills and situational questions. There is also a focus on the use of agentic AI in personal projects, further to work done in university courses. They really want you to have used AI agents to plan and write code as opposed to just using them for research/debugging.