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      Monzo Bank

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      Backend Engineer Interview

      28 Jan 2021
      Anonymous employee
      London, England
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Easy interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Monzo Bank (London, England) in Nov 2020

      Interview

      Overall, the process was very open and transparent, interviewers were very friendly, there were no tricky questions. The recruiters were also very open and helpful, answering my questions quickly while passing through the different stages. All the interviews were done online and I wouldn't say that this impacted my ability to present myself. It all started at the end of October, when I got contacted by one of the talent sourcers. It was a friendly chat where I got asked a bit about me and my experience, the tech stack I'm using, etc. I was given information about the recruiting process, the different stages and had the opportunity to ask questions about the company. Next was the first interview, where I was talking about my experience and more specifically, a system that I had designed, the decisions and the trade-offs I made. The interviewer would stop me occasionally to dive deeper into some parts of the system. The questions, I got asked, were relevant to the project and did not include anything nit-picky or tricky. After passing the first stage, I was given a take home test - to design and implement a system. I used Java to solve it. It took me 5-6 hours to implement the solution and write some unit tests (just the main parts). Then there was a follow up call with another engineer where I walked them through the implementation. The questions were about the design, some implementation details and general questions (e.g. concurrency, mutex, etc.). The final stage consisted of two interviews, done in two different days. But before that, I had a call with the recruiter during which I was given a bit more information about this stage, how to prepare for the behavioural part, some insights about the levels at Monzo, etc. Then I had the System Design Interview. It was about designing a system, what services would you have, how would it scale, etc. The conversation was only on this topic with no random question. After that I had the behavioural interview. It was talking about your experience, very friendly and no hypothetical questions being asked. As I mentioned before, I really liked how transparent everything was and after receiving the offer, the recruiter gave me information about the teams and feedback from the interviews. I even had the opportunity to talk to one of the directors.

      Interview questions [2]

      Question 1

      What is Mutex? How to implement one?
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      How to handle failures when processing a message coming from a queue (say SQS, RabbitMQ, etc.)?
      1 Answer
      16

      Other Backend Engineer interview reviews for Monzo Bank

      Backend Engineer Interview

      8 May 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Monzo Bank

      Interview

      1. Recruiter call — short intro, they explain the role, you ask questions. Low stakes. 2. Initial call (1 hour) — this is the one to prepare hardest for. They've read your CV and want to go deep on a recent project: how it was built, what trade-offs you made, what you'd do differently. It's a conversation, not a quiz — but they will probe the technical details. Pick one project you can talk about inside out. 3. Coding exercise — your choice of take-home or live pair session. Take-home is async in your own IDE, any language, includes a README where you explain your decisions. Live pairing is 45 mins with a Monzo engineer, implementing functions against a provided interface — not leetcode, no binary trees, just practical work. Both end in a review call walking through your code. 4. Systems design (1 hour) — design a scalable system for a hypothetical problem using Excalidraw. They care about your reasoning, not your diagram. Don't namedrop buzzword tech unless you can defend why — they will push back. Know your CAP trade-offs and be able to explain your choices from first principles. 5. Behavioural (1 hour, two interviewers) — communication, how you deliver complex projects, how you work with a team. Be specific about what you did personally versus what the team did. STAR format, concrete examples.
      4

      Backend Engineer Interview

      23 Apr 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Easy interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Monzo Bank

      Interview

      I have never had a more unprofessional interview in my career. The interviewer had his camera on and was clearly working in his bedroom(which isn't an issue) but he didn't blur the background and he had laundry, including his underpants, hanging right behind him. There was also an open door in the background that someone kept walking past which was distracting. He was jumping all over the place with questions during the interview and kept interrupting to take notes which threw me off. It's a shame Monzo don't have a better structure to their interviews.
      2

      Backend Engineer Interview

      27 Mar 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      London, England
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Easy interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Monzo Bank (London, England) in Mar 2026

      Interview

      Same interview process as mentioned on the Demystifying the Backend Engineering Interview Process blog page on their website. I, however, got rejected in the take-home review round. All of the interviewers involved were really nice and warm, and they seemed to have a good internal company culture. The take-home code review round was good in some areas but seemed vague in others, such as scaling. The interviewer was asking questions while trying not to hint at the answers, and in that process the questions turned out to be super vague with some getting lost in translation. The interviewer constantly referred to "semaphores" as workers, which is conceptually incorrect. I also want to add that referring to semaphores as "workers" confused me as to whether the discussion was about scaling in a distributed production setup or something specific to my test code. This missing distinction disrupted my thought process and I got lost thinking about what they were expecting rather than taking an analytical approach to the answer. It looks like they expect specific answers to some of those questions. This pattern is evident if you look at others' interview experiences here.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Crawler take home test, scaling, retry mechanisms, advantages and disadvantages of each choice of data structure, etc
      Answer question