Bxdty

I had a face to face interview in a company in the UK for a 'Senior Data engineer' position.

The interview consisted of a technical Q&A with Tech lead & a data engineer.

This happened after an initial conversational / technical call with the Hiring Manager, followed by a take home assignment. (almost 2 week ago)

The interview went well and the 3rd party recruiter told me that he would represent me for 70-80k as the job advertised and that's what he communicated to the hiring manager, when he was asked my salary expectations after the F2F.

But the recruiter got feedback from the hiring manager that they would be OK with hiring me for the mid level role instead of the senior role. The reason being that he got feedback indicating I am not suited for a senior role since I don't have too much experience mentoring of juniors. The recruiter said that maximum that they might be willing would be 65K .

Due to the nature of the conversation I had with the recruiter, he assumed that I was on the final round of interviews at a different firm for the same 70-80k for a similar role. Well its partly true, but the salary is lower & I didn't quite correct him.

The recruiter said to take a day to think this over, before proceeding further. He told me that the hiring manager said since I already have some final stage interviews lined up for 80K I might not choose his firm for this Mid level role.

I am in a dilemma due to the following:

• I actually applied for this company's job advertisement of Junior to Mid-level data engineer (40-60k) since I was getting rejected out of every senior data engineering profiles with the feedback that I lacked the experience or wasn't a good fit. Also since its been a 3 month long job search, honestly I was getting tired of the job search.




• When the recruiter send my profile a month ago to the firm he upgraded my application to the senior role. He said my resume matched the job description of the senior role more than the lower level roles. That is true, including things like mentoring juniors. and since I had a total work experience of 6 years (with 4+ years in relevant technologies).




• I might not have hit all the answers in the Q&A out of the park to be considered enough for the senior role. Things like scalability & choosing X over Y was very deeply discussed.

The dilemma

Should I take the offer for something reasonably round 65k for this job rather than negotiating for the title or a higher pay?
Then may be try to transition in to the senior role

Note :

• I guess it would be hard to convince them that I am suited for the senior role, without going through another onsite round or hands-on coding interview.




• The HM was kind of confused why the team didn't perform a coding exercise with me.




• They said the take home assignment did give them the right answer, but it didn't show my software engineering skills. This is true since the assignment question was a kind off a vague thought exercise to prove a hypothesis. I did it on a Jupyter notebook since they wanted to see my thought process & story telling skills IMHO the question was mostly suited for a data scientist. They did acknowledge this fact during the F2F interview that the assignment question might not be adequate to judge anyone for this role.




• Answers here kind of addresses my scenario, but not exactly.




• They seem like a nice bunch of people, but only time will tell




• Yes I know the interviewing process is screwed up everywhere