I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Wise in Oct 2021
Interview
The process consists of 5 steps:
- recruiter call (0.5h)
- pair programming task (1h)
- system design round (1.5h)
- product manager interview (0.5h)
- final round (1h)
All the interviews were done on Zoom.
Overall the process was quite smooth and you could always ask for feedback from the recruiter.
What I didn't like was that each step was done with someone in a completely different department. It was only at the last step where you actually had a talk with your team lead (which is one of the important steps IMO). Why waste so many rounds to only at the end discover that the culture fit wouldn't be right.
System design interview tested your knowledge about basic development processes and in the end required to design a simple architecture on an online whiteboard.
Product manager interview was very laid back. I enjoyed this probably the most.
I was rejected at the final round which was mostly technical talk about your previous experience and also was quite similar to the system design interview. Didn't really understand why would candidates need to do 3rd technical round on top of all the previous ones.
All in all, everyone seemed really smart in the company. Had some great insight how Wise works.
The interview process was long but designed to test soft skill along with the usual coding. I felt the interviewers looked more at my thought process and evaluated how good of a teammate I would be in Wise’s environment.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The pair programming round was generic one. They gave a class with methods to be completed.
In pair-programming round i got the question on circuit breaker.
They gave an object oriented skeleton code with some placeholders to fill-up. Evaluation criteria would be mostly on if u knew about the circuit breaker before, if u are able to think and propose multiple approaches, how well you can collaborate with the interviewer.
You need not write syntax perfect code as you need not compile or execute it but the code should be optimised enough with right data structures.
I found the overall experience to be quiet good and easier than FAANG.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
About Circuit Breaker that count failures in time based window
Applied online. Received online assessment link. Gave their hackerrank test which had 2 coding questions. All test cases passes. Immediately received automated mail that recruiter will contact you. After few hours got email that they have decided to move forward with other candidates.
That is my application was not even reviewed by the recruiter(which usually takes 1-2 mins) before sending the test link.