Our technical interviewing process starts with a Pair Programming session where we’ll aim to see if there’s a mutual fit before we proceed to the main interviewing round.

The goal of a Pair Programming interview is to understand your hands-on coding skills more in-depth. 

It takes 1 hour, including a very short intro and 5 minutes at the end to answer your questions, if any.

To carry out the interview, we’ll use an interactive coding platform on HackerRank where the idea is for you to collaborate with your interviewer to solve a technical task.

Our main programming language is Java, however, some teams are also open to using other programming languages. Your recruiter will discuss this with you during the initial call. 

• Collaboration and communication: How you work together with us to solve the problem and communicate and rationalise your choices. We want to understand how you approach the problem and why you approach it this way, along with how you design your solution and incorporate feedback and suggestions into it
• Architecture: How you approach the architecture of your code – why you make certain decisions over others and how you look at trade-offs when building your code
• Problem solving: How you approach a non-trivial problem within a set time
• Code quality: We’ll also want to get an understanding of the clarity, testability and readability of your code.

What a Pair Programming interview is about:

• Questions on algorithms, data structures, space/time complexity, concurrency
• Questions on understanding of the specific programming language features (implementation of data structures, concurrency, exceptions, memory management in the specific language)
• Questions on understanding of coding industry practices (SOLID, DRY, KISS, etc.)

What a Pair Programming interviews is not about:

• System design – this will be the focus of another interview
• Riddles, trick questions or logic puzzles
• General non-coding questions and deep-dive into things like your past experience, projects and so on (besides a short introduction, of course!).

During a coding interview, we’ll assess whether you can write code that’s correct, readable and well thought-through. 

It’s ok to forget some specific method syntax (as you would google in real life), etc. Please tell the interviewer, and they will help you.

We’re mostly interested to learn how you think so please provide a narrative as you go through the code. 

We recommend reviewing:

• Computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, time/space complexity, concurrency, etc). 
• Language-specific features (implementation of data structures, concurrency, exceptions, memory management in the specific language).

It will also help if you refresh the basics of the microservice world and client-service communication.

The best possible way to succeed is to practise. There are many websites that contain a lot of useful information and questions you can practise solving such as leetcode.com, topcoder.com, coderbyte.com, hackerrank.com.

• It’s crucial to understand the problem you have to solve. If the question is unclear or has been left intentionally open – always feel free to ask clarifying questions.
• We want to understand your thought process so please explain what you are doing and why.
• While solving a question, it’s good to think about different algorithms and algorithmic techniques (sorting, divide- and-conquer, dynamic programming/memoization, recursion, etc).
• It’s important to know data structures and the complexity of their operations, especially the ones used most often (Array, Stack/Queue, HashSet/HashMap, Trees, Heap, Graph, etc).
• One additional tip we can give is that sometimes modifying the problem or thinking about it in smaller pieces may be helpful.
• Finally, your interviewer isn’t there to just assess you, they’re also there to help. Don’t hesitate to ask questions and keep the interview as a discussion.

Good luck!