Tech interviews in the UK: pay, notice periods, and what's different

1. What tech roles actually pay in London (in £)

The first thing to fix is your number. Salary sites and Levels.fyi mostly show US pay, and UK pay is a lot lower. A rough picture for a senior software engineer in London:

• Most companies: around £70,000 to £125,000 base, with a median near £90,000.
• Big US tech in London (Google, Meta, Amazon): roughly £180,000 to £220,000 total once stock is included.
• Quant firms (Jane Street and similar): far higher again, with senior packages well past £400,000, the top of the London market.

For comparison, a US senior engineer averages around $200,000, and the big US firms pay $300,000 or more. So London is roughly two to three times lower in total pay, and the main reason is equity. UK packages are more base salary and much less stock, especially outside US-headquartered firms and a few large scale-ups. The takeaway is simple: negotiate against the £ bands above, not the US numbers, and use the company type (see below) to set your expectations. Our 2026 Tech Interview Report has the full per-role breakdown, but note its headline figures are US, knock them down for London.

2. UK notice periods are long, plan your search around them

This is the biggest practical difference, and the one people forget. In the UK your notice period is usually written into your contract and runs one to three months. Senior roles are often a full three. In the US, two weeks is normal. Once you add the interview process on top, the time between accepting an offer and actually starting is often eight to sixteen weeks for a senior role.

What that means for how you run your search:

• Start earlier than feels necessary. The whole thing moves slowly, so give yourself runway.
• Tell a new employer your notice period up front. Three months isn't a dealbreaker here, they expect it, but spring it late and you look disorganised.
• Be ready for “gardening leave.” Some employers send you home on full pay for your notice, often when you're joining a competitor, and you can't start the new job until it ends.
• Remember you're committed once you resign. A long notice cuts both ways, so be sure before you hand it in.

If you're job hunting while still employed, the long notice makes discretion and timing even more important, we cover that in how to interview while you're still employed.

3. UK interview loops differ depending on the company

There isn't one “UK interview.” What you face depends a lot on who's hiring:

• Big US tech in London (Google, Meta, Amazon) runs almost the same loop as in the US: LeetCode-style coding rounds, system design, and behavioural interviews. If you're prepping for one of these, the standard US-style prep applies directly.
• UK-grown companies, fintech, scale-ups, and startups, more often use take-home tasks, practical or pairing exercises, and put more weight on whether you fit the team and communicate well. There's usually less raw algorithm pressure and more “can you actually do this job with us.”

So check the company before you prep. A Monzo or Revolut loop and a Google London loop ask for fairly different things.

How the loop actually runs at some of London's best-known engineering employers:

• Monzo: A one-hour technical call walking through a recent project and its trade-offs, usually with no live coding. Then you pick a take-home of about three to four hours or a 90-minute pairing session and review it on a call. The final loop is two one-hour sessions, system design and a behavioural values interview, with a recruiter prep call first.
• Revolut: A five to six stage process over roughly three to six weeks: recruiter screen, a timed HackerRank assessment on data structures, algorithms and SQL, a live coding session, a system design round, a multi-day take-home with production-quality code and tests, and a behavioural team-fit round. Selective and production-focused.
• Wise: A recruiter chat, then a paired coding exercise or a take-home you walk through afterwards. The core round is about 90 minutes, split between your experience and a system design task that takes up most of it, then a behavioural or hiring-manager round on Wise values.
• Deliveroo: A recruiter screen, a 90-minute HackerRank take-home, then a technical interview reviewing and extending your submitted solution live. The final loop is three parts: live coding, system design and behavioural. Deliveroo asks you not to use AI tools during the interview itself.
• Starling Bank: A recruiter chat, then a technical conversation with an engineer, then a take-home with deliberately vague instructions, often integrating with the Starling public API and making your own assumptions. If it goes well, you meet two engineers plus an HR round. Averages around 28 days.
• Barclays: A recruiter screen, an online assessment (SHL-style aptitude plus data structures, algorithms and SQL), a one-way HireVue video interview of five to eight questions tied to Barclays values, then technical interviews on coding, OOP, SQL and past projects, and a behavioural interview on culture fit.

These loops describe engineering hiring. Management and leadership candidates (Engineering Manager, Director, VP) meet a similar UK process but a different bar, so pair this page with the leadership interview prep hub and your role guide.

4. Who's hiring in London, and what they pay

London's tech employers fall into roughly three pay tiers:

• Top tier: quant firms (Jane Street, Optiver, Citadel) and big US tech (Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Bloomberg, Palantir, Stripe). Highest pay, US-style interviews, and they sponsor visas.
• Scale-ups and fintech: Monzo, Revolut, Wise, Starling, Cleo, plus AI labs like DeepMind and Wayve. Solid pay, usually some equity, and a wider mix of interview formats. London's real strengths are fintech and AI.
• Startups: lower base, more equity, and faster, less formal processes. Visa sponsorship is hit or miss, so ask early.

5. Visas and right to work in the UK

If you need the right to work, the main route into a tech job is the Skilled Worker visa, and only employers with a sponsor licence can offer it. Big tech and most established scale-ups sponsor; smaller startups often can't. The simplest move is to ask the recruiter on the very first call whether the role comes with sponsorship. It takes one sentence and stops you spending weeks on a company that can't actually hire you.

6. How to prep for a UK interview

Interviewing in the UK leans structured and competency-based. Larger firms and banks run STAR interviews (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and score your answers against a fixed rubric, so vague stories fall flat. The tone rewards quiet, evidence-backed confidence over loud self-promotion, and overselling can land badly. London splits between fast fintech shops like Monzo and Revolut and the slower, more formal finance and consultancy world, each with its own pace. Right-to-work and Skilled Worker visa questions come up early, often on the first recruiter call, and salary is discussed fairly openly.

Questions that come up more often in the UK than elsewhere:

• Do you have the right to work in the UK, or will you need Skilled Worker visa sponsorship, and from what date?
• Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate on a technical decision. What did you do, and what was the outcome?
• Why do you want to work here, and why in the UK specifically rather than elsewhere?
• What are your salary expectations for this role?
• Describe a situation where you had to deliver under a tight deadline with incomplete information.

The role itself doesn't change at the border. A senior engineer is held to a senior engineer's bar in London just as in San Francisco, so the substance of your prep, the questions, the level, the failure modes, comes from the role-by-role guides. This page is the UK layer on top: pay in pounds, a longer timeline, and a process that shifts with the company. It's also worth reading why strong candidates get rejected, since those mistakes don't care which country you're in.

When you have a specific UK role in front of you, paste its job description into Calibrd. It reads that exact posting, predicts the questions that company tends to ask, and benchmarks the comp, which you can sanity-check against the £ bands above.

Sources

• Levels.fyi, Senior Software Engineer, London , London total-compensation data, including big-tech and quant pay.
• Glassdoor UK, Senior Software Engineer, London , base-salary ranges and median across London employers.
• Notice Periods UK: a guide for tech professionals , typical one-to-three-month tech notice periods and offer-to-start timing.
• Notice periods explained: UK vs US , the contrast with US at-will, two-week norms.
• Demystifying the backend engineering interview process (Monzo) , official Monzo walkthrough of the call, practical task and final loop.
• Interview guide for engineers (Deliveroo) , official Deliveroo take-home, live coding, system design and behavioural stages.
• Revolut's five-stage interview process (eFinancialCareers) , the Revolut multi-stage assessment and take-home structure.
• Interviews (Wise Jobs) , official Wise page on paired coding, take-home and the system design round.
• Skilled Worker visa (GOV.UK) , authoritative source for UK sponsorship and right-to-work.