I applied online. I interviewed at Lloyds Banking Group (Bristol, England) in May 2026
Interview
I applied in mid February to receive a final (very generic) rejection email in mid May.
There were two rounds held sporadically during this (12-13 week) period where the interviewers were rather pleasant and interesting discussions on gen ai including NLU and NLG.
They said I should hear soon, I didn’t hear anything for a month, despite sending a follow up to HR and another to the interview team.
Caveat emptor.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Lloyds Banking Group (Bristol, England) in Oct 2025
Interview
PROCESS
1. Short call with Talent Acquisition to clarify details regarding location, role title, renumeration and general technical/leadership background.
Slight red flag, as job titles and gradings were still being defined and despite applying for a role advertised as £71k, was asked if I would consider a role at the band below. Only transparent that the lower band role was £53k when I explicitly asked - quite a jump.
2. Hour interview with two members of the engineering team. 20-25 mins of a single data design type situation, and 30 mins of 5 x values based questions related to data experience.
Questioning style slightly confusing and misleading; very broad questions and informed at beginning to focus on overall process and what I did, and then immediately fed back that answers were quite high level and they were looking for details of metrics, success criteria, methodologies and actual numeric results etc. despite also mentioning timekeeping at least three times. 6 minutes a value with that level of detail is insufficient for a senior technical role.
The values based questions related to data did not intuitively fit into the value category stated, so it was difficult to related examples using just the information about the values on the website prior to interview. At least three of the values heavily overlapped, so ensure you have plenty of distinct examples. Fitting their questions into the values felt like a real shoehorn/imaginative leap.
3. Told it would take 2 weeks for next steps.
Received generic email rejection in 4 days - guess it was a hard no!!
Would have rated the interview as easy, had it not been for the vagueness of the questions, and how the specific questions for the values did not all align well with data experience and described values online.
Approach overall didn't leave the greatest impression, but I am grateful it wasn't a protracted stressful 3 week interview process with multiple tests and stakeholders etc. with the same minimal feedback.
Feel that I've been given a get out of jail free card!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. End to end data design task including classification and anomaly detection. Focus was heavily oriented towards metric specification and detecting anomalies.
2. 5 values based questions, including one about colleague trust, another about weighing up costs when designing a data pipeline, and another about stakeholder engagement.
The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Lloyds Banking Group (London, England)
Interview
round 1: screening call with recruiter (30m)
round 2: a week long technical assignment (ML based problem and report)
round 3: interview with the manager (questions on the report and other technical concepts)
round 4: culture fit
