Candidates applying for Engineering Lead roles take an average of 21 days to get hired, when considering 1 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Wise overall takes an average of 24 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Wise as a Engineering Lead according to 1 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 50%
Phone interview: 50%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied online. I interviewed at Wise (London, England) in Dec 2022
Interview
One of the poorest interviews I've ever had unfortunately. Interviewers were disengaged, un-collaborative and had poor communication skills. Wise looks like a great company on the outside and I hope this was a one off but my experience was not great at all. The interview was a brief introduction followed by a "code challenge", which for an engineering lead I was expecting something more involved than writing a service class that took an input of two strings, doing a Hashmap lookup, or calling an API if not found in the map and returning the result. Granted there were some follow ups with regard to scale and availability but this only scratched the surface of what I would expect a real life day to day responsibilities of an Engineering Lead to look like. Communication was also poor when asking questions about the make up of what being an engineer at Wise looks like and also what the interview process looked like from here on out. The HR screening call also said there would be a second part of the interview where there would be a focus on my experiences of scaling applications and processes, this never happened. I would be extremely concerned at the skill level of Engineering Leadership at Wise if this is bar to be at the level that this role is for. I'll give this stage the benefit of the doubt and hope it was a one off, but if you are interviewing at this level, be aware you may find yourself a bit surprised. I'd expect this type of code challenge for a junior/mid-weight developer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The code challenge itself was to write a Currency Converter that receives two strings for a "From" currency and a "To" currency. The task is to build a service or class that wraps around an already implemented API to return the response in the most appropriate way.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Wise (London, England) in Jun 2022
Interview
Wise responded promptly with an easy form to set up the first round interview at a time that suited me.
The first round interview was with a member of the Talent team, who reviewed my CV and asked about my experience. She quickly made me feel comfortable, and given I had another offer talked to me in detail about how quickly the process could be completed.
I decided to accept the other offer, but commend Wise for the efficiency of their interview process!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Review of experience, and why certain decisions were made
I applied online. I interviewed at Wise (London, England) in Mar 2022
Interview
Initial Recruiter call: I was surprised to see that tech company like Wise had placed someone with graduate experience to do the initial screening for Engineering/Sr Engineering Lead position. Nevertheless, the person was just reading through the questions and expecting the same answers
Next step - Recruiter ghosted for 3 weeks despite the follow up email. Another recruiter jumped in, and asked for call schedule with their Sr Engineering Lead.
Hiring Manager round - Went ok, but not very sure the person really understood what it takes to solve the customer problem. But can see that the person is choking with many teams and looking for a peer. Questions are mostly around tech challenges and none towards people management.
System Design - with Sr Engineering Lead and Engineering Lead - It was more of they wanted to get you to a solution that they have in mind. 90mins non stop without a break. Suggest the leadership team to pay attention to their hiring process and would help if they can train their employees on how to do interviews. Even companies like Meta, Google does the system design to the max of 30mins.
The question was mostly around microservices, message queues and data aggregation.
After that interview, I decided not to go any step further. It clearly exposes the type of culture that is harmful.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- System design solution to aggregate exchange rate data in real time and provide a report for 24hrs aggregation