Recently interviewed for Wise - Staff Software Engineer position for Hyd. This is my experience.

Recruiter Screen

Past experiences, reason for switch, comp expectations. Textbook recruiter screen stuff.

Pair Programming (60 minutes)

Implement a circuit breaker. No tricks, no complex logic.

Considerations:

• Best to design thread-safe structures and rich domains before starting implementation.
• Some edge cases were laid out within the question purposefully, it’s best to clarify ideal behavior making any assumptions.

Follow-ups:

• How would you deploy this in real world applications running in multiple pods? (ex. Not move to central store which will double the network IO and becomes single pof since it falls on critical path. Debate necessity of global consistency in such a scenario).

System Design (90 minutes)

• Past Project Design (first 45-50 minutes) in-depth explanation w.r.t. complexities in data modeling, system architecture. What were the challenges, bottlenecks and tradeoffs considered, etc. Latency, consistency requirements, query patterns used by customers, etc. And what was the complexity, why it came and how it was solved? What guarantees did you provide?

• New system design (next 35-40 minutes). Something similar to flash sale kind of question you find these days, but instead of selling burgers or phones on e-commerce, you have to sell some limited number of shares, and allocate them to users by deducting funds from their balance. The wallets are handled by a different system which gives you some quotas which you need to adhere to. (Key considerations: failure scenarios, making sure money is not lost, users are compensated correctly if order fails or system goes down abruptly etc.)

Product Interview (60 minutes)

• What kind of products are you looking for in your next job, etc. questions around that.
• Explain one of my recent projects where I had authority. I explained the context, problem, solution we implemented, how customers were onboarded, what was the result, etc.
• They asked "convince me to buy your product". When I did that they were convinced and told me they would definitely buy that if they had resources.
• They spoke about failed adoption reality check, why did some customers not use your product, etc.

Hiring Manager (60 minutes)

• Happened in person in Hyd.
• HM joined virtually, Director was present in office.
• Questions about past work exp. Impact, Quality of work, Influence I held, etc.
• Some probing questions, around metrics, operationalization, how do you measure success, etc.
• Explained their roadmap, problems they want to solve, innovations they did, etc.

Offer

Recieved offer call after that. Their comp bands are public here: https://wise.jobs/engineering-career-map/

It was a great experience, hearing from Engineering and Product leaders in their company. The interviewers were very helpful and supportive.

PS: Absolutely will not respond to questions like "how did you apply?". Please stick to the post in discussions.