One of the poorest interviews I've ever had, unfortunately. Interviewers were disengaged, uncollaborative, 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." For an engineering lead, I was expecting something more involved than writing a service class that took an input of two strings, did a HashMap lookup, or called an API if not found in the map and returned 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 to be the real-life, day-to-day responsibilities of an Engineering Lead. Communication was also poor when asking questions about the makeup of being an engineer at Wise 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 about the skill level of Engineering Leadership at Wise if this is the 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.

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.