The process started with the usual recruiting company sending me the job specs, which looked pretty cool and created good expectations in me, since I wasn't really looking for something new.
After a couple of phone calls with two different recruiters, explaining my background to them, they invited me to a face to face interview in their HQ in Holborn. It took like 2.5 hours the whole thing.
The interview went pretty well, as I was very good informed about the whole process of it. The recruiter guy was present as well, which made me feel comfortable, as it was a very easy going guy and I had contact with him from the previous phone calls. The other two guys were very nice to me at every moment, which make the interview very easy to me. Worth noticing that they were not strictly technical, but they looked very smart and very interested in listening what I had to say.
It consisted in a brief introduction where they told me a bit more about the company and their goals. Then it was my turn, so I went through my work experience and told them what lead me to that moment. Afterwards, I had a technical test, about I was informed before the interview. It was quite straightforward, I had to implement a connection to a remote API of their choice. They provided the API keys and some info that I had to pull out. I encountered some problems on it, but could finish it on time. There was another extra task that was too much in my opinion for the exercise, at least if you want to follow good practices, but they didn't make me feel uncomfortable about not being able to finish it. For that task, I was left alone with my personal laptop and it took 1 hour.
Afterwards, I explained to them the RESTful architecture I work with in my current position and they asked me some questions about it. Although, they were not really technical and they told me before the interview, they where very interested in knowing more about it and were making the right questions. The next step was the current CTO explaining the event driven architecture that they had at the moment and a brief description of the projects that they want to rebuild/implement.
The interview finished with some questions.
After some days, I got a call from the recruiter telling me that the interview went well, but that he had the impression that it might be I had not much experience on that field of event driven architectures, which is actually truth. However, in the job spec was literally the sentence: "We’re not expecting you to be experienced in taking an event-driven approach or to have a designed such an architecture from scratch, but you will have worked within one and be able to explain how that system was broken down into smaller services, plus the technology used to achieve this.", so I didn't see that coming. He told me, if I would accept a senior position with an option of getting the lead in few months (I believe, he mention six). I was about reticent, but didn't say no explicitly. Nevertheless, after a couple of days I was phoned and the recruiter told me that it was unfortunately a no for me.
The whole process was a good experience thought.
