What we ask
Our take-home is capped at two hours. We say two hours, we mean two hours, and we check on it. If a candidate spends four, we treat that as our fault for scoping poorly, not theirs for being slow.
The prompt is a real problem we hit last March: a Linear webhook was dropping payloads under load, and our on-call channel in Slack filled with duplicate alerts. We strip the business context, sanitize the payload shape, and hand candidates a repo with the failing test already written.
What we pay
Two hours of senior engineering time is not free. We pay 200 pounds per completed submission, regardless of outcome. Finance flagged it as unusual the first time; now it runs through the same expense flow as contractor invoices.
A short list of what the pay covers:
- The two hours of coding.
- The 20 minute walkthrough call afterward.
- Any follow up questions we send over email.
The rubric lives on GitHub
Our scoring rubric sits in a public repo, versioned like code. Candidates read it before they start. We grade on four axes: correctness of the fix, quality of the test coverage, clarity of the pull request description, and whether the candidate flagged the ambiguities we planted.
If you cannot show a candidate how you will grade them, you do not have a rubric. You have a mood.
We do not hide the trick either. There is a race condition in the retry logic that most candidates miss. That is fine. Missing it is not disqualifying; pretending it does not exist in the walkthrough call is.
Why bother
The hiring market tells engineers their time is worth nothing until an offer lands. We think that assumption poisons the relationship before day one. When someone joins us on a Tuesday, they have already seen how we write tickets, how we scope work, and how we handle disagreement. Nothing about the first week is a surprise.
Two candidates last quarter turned down our offer. Both cited compensation. Neither cited the interview. We will take that trade.
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