Deliveroo Senior Software Engineer interview questions

Pretty standard series of interviews - technical architecture, behavioural, leadership and an online coderpad interview. The majority of these were great, really engaging interviews with a mix of informal chat and deeper dive. The technical architecture interviews were in two parts. Firstly a session where you present on an architecture you have created, talking through the detail and your design decisions. Its a good opportunity to talk through your CV in concrete terms. Secondly was a design interview where you are given a task and asked how you would design a system to solve that problem. Its a good way to discuss your thinking process as you work on the solution to a problem. Doing this virtually wasn't ideal - it would have been great to get around a whiteboard - but we made do with a screen share and box diagrams. Both of these parts are set up as a discussion rather than a list of questions which really allows the interviewer and candidate to free-from discuss experiences and get a good mutual understanding. The behavioural interview is quite aligned to exploring mentoring and staff management. This really allows you to discuss how you have used soft skills to the benefit of others and yourself. You are also asked about mistakes you've made and to talk through examples. Again, this was a really good discussion didn't feel like a list of questions. The coderpad exercise was a pretty straightforward array of strings manipulation task with about 45 mins to complete the task. You can code and talk through what you are doing, giving your rationale for decisions as you go through. Ultimately this was pretty straightforward, nothing unusual. The exception was the leadership interview where the interviewer seemed disinterested and the questions were just a bit lazy and vague. It didn't seem like there had been any reading of my CV in advance to look for areas to explore. It was very much stock questions and we didn't dig into any of my responses for details. I raised that with the recruiter after the interview but didn't get a response. With more than 20 years experience leading large scale IT projects and globally distributed teams this should have been the strongest part of my interview but it was frustratingly difficult to convey this in an interview of this style. In the end the leadership was the only no which made an overall no. Overall the process took around 4 weeks from start to finish with the initial chat then the interviews being set up over the middle 2 weeks and ultimately the decision was conveyed at the end of the 4th week. On the whole the people who interviewed me were great, you get a good sense of the company culture from the people you meet and I was impressed overall.