I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Firstup (London, England) in Sept 2025
Interview
Internal Snr TA Partner reached out for an initial 30 mins call. Then followed by 30 min calls with the following: Hiring Manager, Sr Eng Mgr, Sr Product Director, VP Eng, Team meet + greet and then CPO.
The whole process was completed within 3 weeks and would have been sooner, but there was a slight delay due to holidays.
Though there was in total 7 separate meetings (all 30 mins) - they were very organised and communication/feedback was handled very well. Feedback was given on the same day and I was moved to the next stage promptly.
Interviews comprised of a blend of technical and product-related questions and everyone was very engaging throughout the process.
My point of contact (Ane, Snr TA Partner) handled all communications throughout from initial application to offer and from a candidate's point of view, it was a confident and reassuring experience!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is your experience with API Monetisation strategies?
What are key success metrics for API products?
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