How I got a Software Engineer role at GoCardless via a payments-team referral
By the end of June I'd been job-hunting for three months. The numbers weren't great. I'd sent 64 applications through job boards and LinkedIn Easy Apply, and I'd heard back from three. Two rejected me at the résumé stage. The third moved me to a recruiter screen and then went silent for six weeks. I was a backend engineer at a small fintech, but the team had shrunk twice in the previous year and I'd stopped learning anything new. The plan was to land somewhere serious about payments specifically. The problem was that every application I sent looked like every other one sitting in the same inbox. My CV was the same CV everyone else had. My cover letters were rephrased versions of the JD. The breakthrough wasn't a tactic. It was a person. A friend I'd worked with two companies ago had joined GoCardless eight months earlier on the payments team. We had drinks. I described what I was after, somewhere serious about payments infrastructure, not too big, with engineers who weren't allergic to writing about how the system worked. He asked a few questions about my recent work on idempotency keys and then said he could pass my CV straight to the hiring manager. The recruiter call landed two days later. Thirty minutes, mostly logistics: salary range, notice period, why I was looking. She'd read my friend's note, and the questions felt aimed at me specifically rather than at a stack of similar candidates. The technical loop ran across two weeks. Two coding interviews, one a production-style task on their toy ledger, one a more standard data-structures hour. A system design round where I walked through a webhook delivery system with retries, signing and ordering guarantees. That round went well partly because I'd built something similar before and partly because I'd actually thought about the problem before the interview rather than during it. The final round was a forty-five minute conversation with the engineering director. It wasn't really an interview. He wanted to know what I wanted to be doing in two years, what I'd push back on if I disagreed with a technical call, and how I'd handled the worst on-call rotation of my career. The offer arrived a week later: £67,000. Fair, but a few percent below where I'd pinned my expectations. I asked, in writing, whether there was room to move on the base, walking through the responsibilities of the role and a competing late-stage conversation. They came back forty-eight hours later at £72,000. I accepted the next morning. Two things I'd do differently if I started over. First, I'd have started the conversation with my friend three months earlier, not three months in. Second, I'd have written about my work publicly long before I needed to. The few public references the recruiter found of mine were closed-source and helped less than the conversations did.