I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Firstup in Apr 2025
Interview
Their recruiter contacted me out of the blue and seemed surprised that I wanted to be paid market rates. Seemed like yet another American company with contempt for the engineering talent based abroad - raising the question of why they'd bother head-hunting someone in the UK in the first place. During the interview I was mostly asked DevOps questions by someone who was clearly not technical enough to understand what she was asking. This was particularly bizarre as up until that point I was under the impression that this was more of a backend/full stack position - I don't know why there was such an emphasis on infrastructure. After the interview it dawned on me that this literal HR-tech company might have had an ulterior motive for interviewing so I made a GDPR request (specifically, a deletion request). They never got back to me. Plan to raise this with the ICO as tricking people into attending interviews so that you can feed their data into some AI you're building sounds like a crime to me (if indeed, that is what they're doing). Given the CEO's work history, I probably should have seen something like this coming.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some version of "How does Kubernetes make a business more scalable/performant?" but with a lot of marketing buzz words mixed in
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Firstup (Belfast, Northern Ireland) in Aug 2023
Interview
Applied online. Friend referral. 1st stage: talked to chris, very helpful, we got on very good. Very professional. Chats about company, goals, performance and experience. Loved it. 2nd stage: Testdome. 6 questions. Based on your language of choosing. Goes from easy to difficult incrementally. So used to doing job in real world, my brain did go blank at some instances as i realise i am not“test” strong. Chris was helpful on this matter. 3rd stage: Talk to tech lead. Very formal, professional and past experience. Loved it. 4th stage: technical interview, technical scenario which went fine and leetcode. Leetcode is not indicative of candidate real life experience. A real company workflow assignment or a bug to fix would be better suited. Gives candidates to know what real day looks like if they were to join. Had 2/3 More stages to follow but had zoom call issues with leetcode and hence was able to write pseudocode and halfway through coding solutions, could not connect back to call. Totally my fault though for choosing slow internet provider. Cons: interview process is very long, difficult to do more than 4 stages of interview when I already have a full time job giving 100%. Overall, would of killed the role and contributed heavily but its one of those where the stars don’t align and that’s fine. I still had good experience and i wish rest of the team success.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Unfair to say questions, they are genuine folks run by passionate people. Do prepare leetcode and be good in your language of choice.