I applied online. I interviewed at Graphcore (Bristol, England) in Jun 2026
Interview
Took about a month. Three stages:
a recruiter call,
a call with the hiring manager,
then a face-to-face final at the Bristol office.
The recruitment side was genuinely good, clear communication, and they sorted and paid for my train down, which I appreciated.
One thing that annoyed me on the day: one of the senior interviewers (principal engineer) who was meant to be there didn't show up in person, someone else stepped in instead, and I only found out when I arrived. Things come up, but for a final-stage interview I'd have expected a heads-up or a reschedule rather than finding out on the spot.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Two back-to-back panel sessions, two interviewers each.
First was firmware architecture and system design, solid, relevant discussion.
Second was a whiteboard coding session, the main one being a concurrency problem (spotting a race around a shared variable read-modified-written in an ISR/thread context). Fair question for a firmware role.
Overall the technical bar was fair. Just be ready to code and reason out loud at a whiteboard under pressure.