Tech interviews in Europe vs the US: what's actually different

A developer I know spent three months grinding LeetCode before his first serious round of European interviews. He'd memorised dynamic programming patterns, practised binary search variations until they were automatic, and could recite the time complexity of every sorting algorithm without hesitation. He was, by any measure of the US tech interview playbook, prepared. Then he sat down for a call with a software house in Amsterdam, and they asked him to walk through a project he'd built and explain the decisions he'd made. He froze. Nobody had told him that was going to be the interview.

He didn't get the job — not because he wasn't technically capable, but because he'd prepared for the wrong exam. The content on tech interviews is overwhelmingly American, overwhelmingly FAANG-oriented, and almost entirely useless if you're interviewing at a European company. This is the article I wish he'd read before those three months of preparation.

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Why the US playbook doesn't travel well

The American tech interview format — algorithmic problem-solving, system design for billion-user scale, behavioural questions framed around Amazon's leadership principles — was built for a specific context. It emerged from companies hiring thousands of engineers per year, needing to filter candidates at scale with minimal interviewer time per candidate. A standardised, gameable format made sense for that problem. It doesn't make sense for a software house hiring ten people a year, where every hire matters enormously and the interview is as much about understanding how someone thinks as it is about filtering out the unqualified.

Most European tech companies, and virtually all European software houses, are not hiring at Google scale. They're building teams where each person works closely with everyone else, where communication and collaboration are as important as raw algorithmic ability, and where the cost of a bad hire is felt immediately and personally. This creates a fundamentally different set of incentives for how to design an interview process — and a fundamentally different set of qualities to look for in candidates.

There's also a cultural dimension that's easy to underestimate. European engineering culture, broadly speaking, values craft over velocity, depth over breadth, and honesty about uncertainty over confident performance. A candidate who answers every question with polished certainty, who never says "I don't know" or "it depends," who treats the interview as a performance rather than a conversation — this candidate reads very differently to a European hiring manager than to an American one. What signals confidence in a US context can signal superficiality in a European one.

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How European interviews are actually structured

The typical European software house interview process has three stages, each evaluating something distinct. Understanding the structure in advance doesn't undermine the evaluation — it lets you prepare for what actually matters.

The first stage is a conversational call, usually 30-45 minutes. This is not a technical screen. It's a conversation about your background, your career choices, what brought you to apply. The interviewer is listening for how you talk about your work — with genuine engagement or with professional detachment? With awareness of your own limitations or with the tendency to oversell? This call reveals something about how you think and how you communicate, before a single line of code has been discussed.

The second stage is the technical interview proper, typically 60-90 minutes, split between a discussion of your most significant project and a live coding exercise on a realistic problem. Both parts are conducted by a senior engineer or CTO — not an HR recruiter who doesn't write code. This is important: the person evaluating your technical work actually understands technical work.

The third stage, for candidates who pass the first two, is usually a meeting with the broader team. This is less about filtering and more about mutual assessment — an opportunity for both sides to understand whether there's genuine compatibility in terms of working style, values, and day-to-day culture. The best European companies treat this stage as seriously as the technical evaluation.

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The project discussion: where most candidates lose the interview

The part of the European interview that most candidates underestimate — especially those who've prepared on US content — is the project discussion. You'll be asked to choose a significant piece of work you've done and explain it as if you were walking a colleague through it: what you built, why you made the choices you made, what you'd do differently.

The mediocre answers describe the project. The excellent answers reason about the project. There's an enormous difference between "we used React for the frontend and Node for the backend with a PostgreSQL database" and "we chose PostgreSQL because we needed ACID transactions and our data volume was manageable — if volume had grown significantly I would have revisited that decision." The first answer tells me you know how to use tools. The second tells me you understand why you use them.

The most revealing question in this section is "what would you do differently?" Candidates who can't identify anything they'd change aren't saying their work was perfect — they're saying they haven't reflected on it carefully enough. Candidates who identify three or four specific things they'd change, with clear explanations of why, are demonstrating exactly the quality of thinking that makes someone valuable on a team: the ability to learn from experience rather than just accumulate it.

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Live coding: collaboration, not performance

Live coding is the part of the interview that generates the most anxiety, and understandably so. Writing code while someone watches is inherently stressful. But the live coding exercise at a European software house is not designed as a stress test — it's designed to simulate how you actually work.

The problems are realistic. Not sorting algorithm variations, not graph theory puzzles, not mathematical brainteasers. Typically: parsing and transforming data, writing a function that handles edge cases robustly, refactoring a piece of code that works but is difficult to maintain. Problems that look like actual work, because the point is to see how you approach actual work.

During the exercise, a good European interviewer will intervene — ask questions, suggest alternative directions, introduce new requirements mid-problem. This isn't an attempt to throw you off. It's a simulation of how collaboration works on a real team. A developer who works in total silence and produces perfect code in isolation is less useful than a developer who thinks out loud, accepts input, and integrates feedback in real time. The candidate who stops halfway through, recognises they've been solving the wrong problem, and starts over more cleanly — that's the candidate who gets hired.

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What European hiring managers actually value

Having conducted hundreds of technical interviews, I can tell you that the qualities that consistently predict success at a European software house are not the ones US interview prep focuses on. They're more human, more contextual, and harder to fake.

Intellectual honesty is at the top of the list. The ability to say "I don't know" without anxiety, to acknowledge the limits of your experience, to describe your failures as clearly as your successes — this is remarkably rare and remarkably valuable. Engineering is a discipline built on uncertainty, and the developers who thrive in it are the ones who are comfortable saying they don't have all the answers. The ones who bluff their way through gaps in their knowledge are the ones who create the most expensive bugs.

Communication while thinking matters enormously in collaborative environments. European software houses tend to have smaller teams where everyone works closely together, which means the ability to explain your thinking in real time — to a colleague, to a client, to a product manager who doesn't code — is a daily requirement. An interview is a good proxy for this: a candidate who can articulate their reasoning clearly while solving a problem is demonstrating a skill they'll use every day.

Genuine curiosity about the problem space is the third quality that consistently separates good candidates from great ones. Not curiosity about the technology stack — curiosity about the problems the company is trying to solve, the constraints they're working within, the trade-offs they've already made. Candidates who ask good questions about the product, the codebase, the team dynamics, the technical debt — these are the candidates who will grow fastest in the role, because they're already thinking like engineers rather than like job applicants.

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The salary conversation: a cultural difference worth knowing

One area where European and US tech cultures genuinely differ is around compensation transparency — and understanding this difference can save you from an awkward moment in an interview.

In the US, it's relatively common to discuss compensation early in the process, and candidates are often expected to state their expectations upfront. In Europe, the norms vary significantly by country, but in general, compensation discussions tend to happen later in the process, after both sides have established mutual interest. Bringing up salary in the first call is not necessarily a red flag in Europe — but it can signal that you're optimising for compensation rather than for fit, which reads differently than it would in a US context.

The more important cultural note: European companies, especially outside the UK, tend to be less aggressive about total compensation packages than US tech companies. Base salaries at European software houses are competitive within their local markets, but the equity-heavy, total-comp-maximising culture of Silicon Valley doesn't translate directly. What European companies often offer instead is better work-life balance, more job security, clearer career progression, and — in cases like ours — the ability to live somewhere with a genuinely high quality of life at a reasonable cost. These are real trade-offs, not consolation prizes.

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How to prepare: a practical guide

The best preparation for a European tech interview is not studying algorithms. It's thinking deeply about your past work.

Before the interview, identify two or three projects you've worked on in the last few years and analyse them honestly: what technical choices did you make and why? What would you do differently with hindsight? What unexpected problems did you encounter and how did you solve them? This reflection is useful not just for the interview — it's useful for your professional development in general.

For the live coding portion, the only preparation that matters is writing code regularly in an environment similar to the interview. Don't memorise solutions to standard problems — practise thinking out loud while you write code, explaining your choices in real time, handling edge cases systematically. Use a simple editor without aggressive autocomplete, so you're not dependent on tooling during the interview.

Prepare questions for the company. Candidates who have no questions concern me almost as much as candidates who can't answer mine. The questions you ask reveal as much as the answers you give — and a candidate who wants to understand how the team actually works, what the most interesting technical challenges are, how architectural decisions get made, is already an interesting candidate before writing a single line of code.

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A note on European company examples

The European tech landscape has produced companies with genuinely distinctive engineering cultures worth studying: Spotify's famous squad model, Wise's approach to autonomous teams, Klarna's engineering blog, Booking.com's culture of experimentation. These companies have published extensively about how they hire and how they work — and reading their engineering blogs will tell you more about European tech culture than any amount of LeetCode practice.

None of these companies interview the way Google does. None of them are looking for the same things Google is looking for. If you're preparing for European interviews by studying for Google interviews, you're not just wasting time — you're potentially optimising for qualities that European hiring managers find actively off-putting.

If a European company is asking you to implement a graph traversal algorithm from scratch, that's a signal about their interview culture — and it might not be the culture you want. Most European software houses that run thoughtful interviews will give you problems that look like work: something to parse, something to refactor, a small system to design. If you're seeing heavy algorithmic content in a European interview, it's worth asking whether this company's engineering culture matches what you're looking for.

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FAQ

Do I need to know a specific programming language to apply? No. We evaluate reasoning, not syntax. Use the language you're most comfortable with during the live coding — what matters is how you think, not which keywords you type.

Is the technical interview synchronous or asynchronous? Synchronous, via video call. We don't use asynchronous coding tests or automated platforms — we want a conversation, not an exam.

Can I apply if I don't have a public GitHub portfolio? Yes. A portfolio helps, but it's not a requirement. What matters is that you can talk in depth about the work you've done, even if the code isn't publicly accessible.

How should I prepare if I'm coming from a bootcamp with limited professional experience? Be honest about your experience. What we evaluate in junior profiles is potential for growth, not accumulated experience. Show us how you think, how you learn, how you approach problems you don't know how to solve — that's more useful than any portfolio project optimised to impress.

How long does the full process take from first call to decision? Typically 2-3 weeks from the first call to the final decision. We try to move quickly because we know strong candidates often have multiple processes running in parallel.

I'm based outside Spain — can I still apply? Yes, and many of our developers relocated to Las Palmas from other European countries. We actively support the relocation process. If you're curious about what it means to move here, read our guide on living in Las Palmas as a developer.

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The European tech interview process rewards exactly the qualities you've probably already developed if you've been working seriously as a developer: the ability to think clearly, communicate honestly, and engage with real problems rather than textbook ones. The preparation that matters is the preparation you've been doing your entire career — you just need to know how to show it.

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