How we hire

Your first interview will likely be with one of our expert recruiters and will last between 30 and 60 minutes. During this conversation, the recruiter will tell you more about the role and get to know you better. They'll assess your fit for the role by asking about your work experience, areas of expertise, motivation, and expectations for your next job.

During this interview, the hiring manager will provide detailed information about the role and team structure, as well as discuss how you could be a match for the role. Hiring managers have a clear picture of the role's context, so this is a chance to get a better understanding of the position and ask any questions you might still have before moving on to the following stages. We recommend researching the company and reflecting on how your skills can make a positive impact.

As part of the more detailed assessment, we may ask you to prepare a technical assessment to help us understand how you think. Given that every role is different, the assessment can vary depending on the position you're applying for. It's standard practice at SumUp to assess the hard skills of candidates before finishing the process,  whether with a business case, portfolio presentation, or coding task. Don't worry – we'll provide detailed information beforehand, so you have enough time to prepare.

It's important for you to get a full picture of the team you might be joining, so what better way than to meet some potential future teammates? They’ll provide a broader view of life at SumUp and answer any questions about how we work. This way, you’ll have an inside view of the team culture and dynamics to help you imagine working with us.

In addition to experience, skills, and technical expertise, you'll have an interview with a bar raiser – an interviewer from a different team brought in to give an unbiased perspective on your abilities and values. We're passionate about finding the right candidates for SumUp, focusing on hiring people who will have a long-lasting impact on the services we provide for our merchants and the workplace we build together.  

Our core values – Founder's Mentality, We Care, and Team First – are the bedrock of our culture and dictate how we operate. Founder's Mentality is crucial at SumUp because it is essential to cultivate the autonomy of every SumUpper and team. At SumUp, we want to empower you to act as a founder – making independent decisions that are right for our customers, teams, products and company.

Take your time to research SumUp, our culture and values and think about how they resonate with you.

Summarise your background and experience, highlighting your main achievements.

Reflect on past challenges and situations that show the skills the team is looking for.

It helps to write a few bullet points to help you focus on what's most relevant.

Use the STAR method to structure answers to behaviour-based questions - it'll help you tell a story by laying out the Situation, Task, Action, and Result.

Our hiring process is designed to ensure that the candidate's qualifications make them an ideal fit for the job and for the candidate to assess if SumUp and the role are right for them. On average, our interview plans consist of 5 interviews, which vary depending on the position and seniority level of the role. We usually have 2-3 interviews for customer support and operational positions, and for some roles, the process might include a technical assessment.

We welcome candidates from all over the world and offer relocation on a case-by-case scenario which needs to be approved by the hiring manager. If that's the case for the role you're applying for, we'll provide individual support during your relocation.

SumUp is an office-first company. We believe that regularly working together in the same physical space is a necessary condition to delivering more value to our merchants, building deeper relationships with each other, and creating a fun place to work. In person, we can iterate, innovate, fail, and succeed together, faster. We’re more effective and have more fun in the process. This all creates a virtuous cycle.

And while we optimise for in-person work, we also believe the ability to occasionally work remotely empowers us all to balance work with other aspects of our lives. We trust our people and teams to navigate these occasions with transparency and communication.

If you need a working visa and meet the eligibility requirements of the country you’re applying for, our Global Mobility and People Operations team will support the visa process.

To maximise agility across SumUp, we tackle big projects as tribes. Each tribe consists of several smaller, cross-functional squads. Squads are autonomous and equipped with the necessary skills to accomplish their missions.

At SumUp, we encourage you to be the driver of your own career. That said, we have several different tools to help you throughout your journey. Our internal career progression framework, Seeds & Steps, visualises the different career paths in SumUp and enables you to align expectations for your role by giving you a compass for what skills, competencies and behaviours you need to be successful in your current and next role. 

Another tool that’s a big part of the career development journey at SumUp is our 360 feedback cycle, Talk-Align-Develop or TAD. TADs empower SumUppers to take control of their development and foster a culture of open and radically candid feedback among colleagues.