I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Santander (Washington, DC) in Oct 2025
Interview
Then comes the HR filter and the technical part. The engineering manager interrupted each answer when each one was correct, and finally, a code exercise on how to create a summation method without using built-in operations and addition operators. The focus was on converting to bits and generating a bitwise sum (without using any of the addition or built-in operators).
After good answers, I was rejected for not communicating ideas correctly, but my profile was very robust and good.
In general terms, HR communication was good, but the interview with the engineering manager was generally poor. His feedback made me expect that either he didn't know the topics in depth or he would cut me off and stay and evaluate as he wished.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Is Groovy compiled or interpreted?
2. How do you stop a cron job?
3. What is the difference between Java and Groovy?
4. What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL in SQL?
5. What are the types of SQL joins?
6. What is the difference between Heap and Stack memory?
7. What is the Singleton pattern?
8. 8. How would you implement a method sum(x, y) without using built-in operations or the '+' operator?
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Santander (London, England) in Aug 2023
Interview
The process took 3 weeks and I was interviewed in August 2023 and is composed of 3 steps. The first one was a screening interview with a friendly recruiter which presented himself and the company. He asked to present myself and asked me some easy behavioural question such the reason I applied and what was a technical challenge I faced during my career. The second step was a technical interview with a Principal Engineer which presented me a coding challenge to solve in 20 minutes and afterwards they asked me few technical questions about Java and databases. It took one hour. Unfortunately I was not able to complete the coding challenge even though was easy but I was too nervous so I did not pass it, The third and last step would have been another technical session of 1h.30min with two senior engineer. Overall positive experience despite I failed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Given in input an array of numbers, returns a string with the duplicate values in ascending order separated by a comma as for example "1,2,3". Q: Tell me about Hashcode and Equals? Q: When do you prefer a SQL database over NoSql database and vice versa?
