I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Simplestream in Feb 2026
Interview
Interview consisted of 3 stages.
1. Interview with Software dev manager, senior dev, developer and a devops engineer. I was asked questions about my experience (pretty standard procedure), experience with their tech stack and was given time to ask questions about the company and role.
2. "take home test", but instead it was almost a live coding test, just on my own. The first 10-15 mins were discussions and set up for the test. The teams call was then ended for an hour while i worked on the test. The expectation was that i'd push the code to github at the end of the test, we then reviewed my code via screen sharing.
3. Final interview with the technical director. Very similar to the first interview, but aimed more at higher level concepts and stakeholder/workload management. Interview went over the allotted time, had a good conversation about things, left the interview feeling positive.
Didn't receive any feedback for over a week, and when i did it wasn't helpful. Was told that technically i exceeded, but wasn't a good "culture fit" despite the interviews being very positive. Extremely frustrating having to do 3 stages of interviews to not receive any meaningful feedback.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you explain a technical issue to a non-technical stakeholder?
The interview process was smooth and well organised. I had a phone screen, followed by technical interviews. The questions were fair, and the team was friendly, responsive, and respectful throughout.
The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Simplestream (London, England) in Jul 2020
Interview
I got in touch with Simplestream through a recruiter and had an interview with the Head of Development real quick. Very shortly after the interview I heard I was invited to do a coding challenge, which was 1-2 hours max.
The challenge even if done bad, without documentation and tests was not possible in under 2 hours. I spend half a day on the challenge and got great feedback. Besides some personal preferences and some minor untidiness I was invited to have a meeting with another colleague and the CEO.
After the first colleague I was waiting in the call for the CEO to arrive. After 1 hour and 15 minutes I reached out to the recruiter. Had to hop back in the call later but again no CEO.
I then heard they couldn't get a hold of him, and the day after suddenly I hear that the person I spoke with was questioning my technical skill set and my knowledge of Laravel.
Interesting because he didn't ask me anything technical and the Head of Development had already spoken to me twice.
After that I replied to the recruiter and the last thing I heard was that they were looking for someone with more specific experience in this case on Unit testing and Docker.
The funny thing is, Unit testing is something I do every day and Docker was listed in the job spec as "Nice to have experience with but you can learn this on the job".
Something else happened here and they were simply not being honest about it. Being dropped because someone who only asked about how I deal with certain situations thinks I'm not good enough as a developer even though I've already been through their coding challenge and was pushed forward by the Head of Development.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a situation where you had to deliver bad news to a colleague.
