I was contacted by Glovo's recruiting team for a Senior iOS Engineer position in Berlin. Only at the start of the call did the recruiter mention she hadn't noticed I had previously interviewed for a different role (Staff iOS, Barcelona) less than a year prior. She then informed me that their system now enforces a 1-year cooldown between interviews — a policy that apparently didn't exist during my previous process. When I pointed out that we were in March and my previous interview was in May, making it less than two months away from the one-year mark, and that this was a different role in a different city, the response was essentially that the policy is the policy. The issue isn't the cooldown itself — it's that I was invited back, went through scheduling, and only found out about the blocker once the call had already started. A basic check before reaching out would have avoided wasting both sides' time. Beyond the logistics, the process itself lacks structure and consistency. The HR recruiter asks technical questions about topics like Swift concurrency and architecture choices, and then the feedback comes back saying your answers weren't technically deep enough. If the interview is HR-led, candidates naturally calibrate to that context. If you want technical depth, have an engineer on the call — or be transparent that the recruiter is evaluating on behalf of an AI system reviewing the transcript. It's unclear who is actually assessing you: the recruiter, an engineer, or an algorithm. In the technical rounds of a previous process, the architecture interview felt like the engineers expected you to arrive at their specific solution rather than evaluate your reasoning and flexibility. When I approached the problem with a context-driven, trade-off-based mindset — which is exactly what senior engineers are supposed to do — it was framed as a negative. Similarly, not using every possible Swift syntax or framework in a given answer was interpreted as not knowing them, rather than making deliberate choices appropriate to the problem at hand. Senior engineering interviews should assess judgment and adaptability, not whether you mirror a predefined answer or demonstrate every tool in your arsenal unprompted. The recruiter was polite, but the overall process showed a lack of coordination, consistency, and transparency. If you've interviewed with Glovo before, confirm your eligibility before investing time in their process.

1. Interview with HR where I had to talk about my past experiences and some basic technical questions, some of which about data structures and algorithms. The interviewer main goal at this stage was to assure that I had basic CS and iOS platform knowledge, which would made me adequate for facing the real interview process and that I had cultural values they were looking for. 2. First technical step were I was asked questions for 1 hour straight about computer science and the iOS platform. 3. 1 hour cultural fit 4. 1 hour design architecture 5. 1 hour and half live coding, were they tested my abilities to refactor code and implement new features respecting some constraints.