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      Kernel Developer Interview

      15 Mar 2023
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Vancouver, BC

      Other Kernel Developer interview reviews for Canonical

      Kernel Developer Interview

      6 Jan 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Canonical

      Interview

      A long written interview, followed by 3 schedulled calls. A long and tiring process to ultimately get ghosted. The more technical interviews (regarding OS) was quite a pleasant and enjoyable experience, but the python interview was heavily focused on trick questions and unneccessary details.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Hierarchy in python and how inheritence works
      Answer question
      1
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Canonical (Vancouver, BC) in Mar 2023

      Interview

      The ridiculousness of the interview process is well explained in other posts here and online. I'll give some insight into the later stages after you pass the initial written, technical, and IQ test portions. Once you pass these, you are then scheduled for three, one hour interviews with members of the team you'd be on. These are very casual. The interviews have a list of questions but none of them stuck to them really. These were friendly chats about their work, the company in general, and your experience. There were also some technical questions about git, multithreaded concepts, race conditions, locks, operating systems concepts, and interrupts. If you pass this you are scheduled for an hour long interview with a person from HR. My interview was very formal and unfriendly. The interviewer had a list of questions they sped through. They also explained the company's travel policy, bring your own device policy, and asked for a salary expectation. If you don't give one they will push. They ask you questions like "describe a time you had a conflict and how you resolved it", "what is your proudest achievement in school", "how did you decide to study what you're studying". Passing this you will then get scheduled with two, one hour long, late stage interviews with higher level managers. One of these is with the person who has final say in the hiring decision. These felt like the only interviews that mattered. More technical questions similar to the above. More questions about your experience and knowledge of specific technologies. Much less friendly environment. Finally, you get an explanation of what you will actually be doing as no one before seemed to know. If you pass this, they mention the chance of having one more interview with another member of the team if they are unsure. The CEO also needs to sign off on any offer and reserves the right to interview any potential candidate. This is rare but does happen apparently. I did not pass this final stage. Overall, as many people have said, the process is ridiculous. It shows a lack of respect for the applicant's time and turns away good talent. No one I talked to at the company had gone through the same interview process as it's fairly new and therefore none of them could answer what to expect or how much longer it would be. It reflects poorly on the CEO who seems to not have anything better to do than review new grad hiring himself and argue with people about the hiring process he created. I finished the early stage assignments easily. Each interviewer during the early stages said that my experience was good and that I could perform the job. It's frustrating to then discover these early steps and interviews didn't seem to even factor into the final decision. None of the steps were particularly hard but the spaced out nature, the number of steps, and the uncertainty of the whole process made it horrible.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      What is a race condition? Can a single threaded program have race conditions? Can python be multithreaded? How do interrupts work?
      Answer question

      Kernel Developer Interview

      14 Apr 2025
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Nairobi
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Canonical (Nairobi)

      Interview

      Detailed but long. At first they may ask you questions concerning educational background eg highschool and uni. I found the highschool bit to be odd. Later parts of the interview are moderately technical and straightfoward. Having contributed to canonical open-src projects is a big plus

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      How would you criticize Canonical's technical decisions that you know of?
      Answer question

      Kernel Developer Interview

      11 Aug 2023
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Canonical

      Interview

      Il faul écrire un article sur toi-même, en répondant dizaines de questions sur les expériences, meme si elles sont déjà dans ton CV. Il y a aussi un test de caractéristique, qui est trop long et sans sens.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      What kinds of software projects have you worked on before? Which operating systems, development environments, languages, databases? That is not a checklist, just some suggestions of what to describe you have worked with. Would you describe yourself as a high quality coder? Why? Would you describe yourself as an architect of resilient software? If so, why, and in which sorts of applications? What software products have you yourself lead which shipped many releases to multiple customers? What was your role?
      Answer question
      1