I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Wise (London, England) in Oct 2023
Interview
There are 5 interview stages at Wise:
1. Initial screening, 30-minute talk to a recruiter.
2. Coding challenge, 60 min with two engineers. The task (45 min) was similar to LC 695 + implement input from stdin. Then 15 min for Q.
3. System design, 90 min with two engineers. Design Wise in simplified terms. I was asked about load balancing, idempotency and consistency.
4. Product thinking interview, 60 min with PM and prospective team lead, seems to be the hardest one :). Almost impossible to prepare yourself. I was asked questions about successful projects and measuring the success, unsuccessful ones and possible reasons. Reading Wise's Medium blog helps here.
5. Final interview, 60 min with two engineers. Mix of questions about experience, mindset, preferred environment etc. A variation of a cultural fit interview.
All in all that was quite nice experience. Recruiter sent me descriptions for each step as well as a blog post about hiring process at Wise (dated 2018 but still relevant).
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.