Barclays
UK bank hiring data scientists and AI engineers at its India tech centres
Interview in a few hours? A quick sprint for Barclays
AI in interviews
Barclays bans third-party AI tools in its interviews, including transcription bots and meeting assistants. If you're caught using one, the interview is stopped, your application is withdrawn, and future applications may be affected.
Typical interview loop
How Barclays usually runs it for applied AI and LLM engineer roles.
- Focus: CV match to role
Online application
You fill in an online form covering your education and work history and upload a CV.
- Focus: Values fit, ways of working
Online assessment or phone screen
Shortlisted applicants take an online assessment of up to an hour (practice tests are offered) or a phone interview of about 30 minutes, and the assessment has a minimum pass score.
- Focus: Past behaviour, role skills
Interviews
Virtual or face-to-face interviews where you give examples of how you have worked in the past and show the skills the role needs.
- Focus: Applied problem solving
Role exercise (some roles)
Some roles add a case study, a role play or a presentation alongside the interviews.
- Focus: Background checks
Pre-employment screening
Candidates who pass the interviews supply extra information for background screening, and what's checked depends on the country.
Topics to prepare for Barclays
The topics its loop weighs most, each with what interviewers check and what to study.
- Behavioral interviews: STAR stories for AI engineersBehavioral
- The project deep-dive roundBehavioral
- Story bankBehavioral
- Interview openers and closersBehavioral
- Embeddings basics: word2vec, contrastive learning, what embeddings captureML fundamentals
- Self-attention from scratchTransformers
- Retrieval for RAG: chunking, hybrid search, rerankingRAG
- Evals and error analysisEvals
How it weights your plan
Selecting Barclays when you build a plan multiplies each topic’s priority score:
Official prep and resources
Public candidate write-ups
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