I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks.

I was contacted by an external recruiter who was great throughout the experience and very helpful with some of the issues I encountered. After making sure my role and salary expectations were reasonable, I had a brief chat with a manager on one of their teams where we discussed my experience and my expectations around the role. After that, they had me do a one-hour technical screen with a developer.

Once that was done, they asked my availability for three more interviews (one hour each) and then sent me a schedule that completely disregarded my availability and was very short notice (less than 18 hours). I pushed back and they rescheduled.

The process was:

• The first session: Another coding exercise with two developers/"managers" where they were vague about what they expected and questioned my approach despite me stopping multiple times to ensure what I was doing was aligned with their expectations.
• The second session: A 'bring your own' project design review where I walked two of their developers/"managers" through a past project.
• The final interview: A "culture" interview with two of their developers/"managers".

I use "managers" lightly because Wealthsimple seems to give every senior developer/team lead a manager title. They repeatedly brought up as a point of pride that all of their managers are also individual contributors and they only hire senior developers and above as managers. Given their documented struggles with technical leadership, I asked whether they were reconsidering this and how they were making space for senior level ICs who did not have or want manager titles, and they had no good answers. I also asked for examples of staff and above level ICs who were not also managers or ex-managers, and they were unable to provide any. They were also unable to provide any good answers to how product development works at Wealthsimple or how they operate in a high compliance space like finance.

I was very unimpressed with the quality of all the managers I spoke with. They were very evasive in answering questions I had and were very defensive about Wealthsimple's culture and operations. I spoke only with a single female/minority interviewer, and she was cut off and spoken over multiple times by her peer (also her manager, I believe) even when I directed questions to her specifically. When I asked a pair of male managers what Wealthsimple was doing to increase diversity/inclusion, they weren't willing to tell me what percentage of their current teams were POC/female. I expect because their numbers are very poor.

Additionally, I felt like I was not afforded any real respect throughout the process. Wealthsimple's interviewers were 3-5 minutes late for every single one of the interviews, and all promised to give me time at the end of the interview to ask questions, but all went right up to time with their own exercises/questions. To their credit, they all did offer to spend extra time beyond what was scheduled to answer my questions, but I feel like as a fairly senior candidate I should be given more opportunity to make sure the role and company are a good fit for me as much as they should be ensuring I am a good fit for them.

I finished up the interviews and gave feedback to my recruiter that I wouldn't accept any offer until I got to speak to a senior-level manager who could give me better answers around what the expectations would be on my role and how they would ensure I had the agency to achieve those expectations. They decided not to continue with the process at that point.

• Code Screen: They asked me a variant of the Mars rover problem (https://code.google.com/archive/p/marsrovertechchallenge/) and introduced gradually more difficult requirements as I solved it.
• Technical Interview: They asked me to design an order matching system for a simple trading book matching orders on symbol and quantity and selecting the best price available.
• Technical Interview: Explain a past project.