Initial Recruiter call: I was surprised to see that a tech company like Wise had placed someone with graduate experience to do the initial screening for an Engineering/Sr Engineering Lead position. Nevertheless, the person was just reading through the questions and expecting the same answers.

Next step - Recruiter ghosted for 3 weeks despite the follow-up email. Another recruiter jumped in and asked to schedule a call with their Sr Engineering Lead.

Hiring Manager round - Went okay, but I am not very sure the person really understood what it takes to solve the customer problem. I can see that the person is juggling many teams and looking for a peer. Questions were mostly around tech challenges and none towards people management.

System Design - with Sr Engineering Lead and Engineering Lead - It felt more like they wanted to guide you to a solution they had in mind. 90 minutes non-stop without a break. I suggest the leadership team pay attention to their hiring process and it would help if they could train their employees on how to conduct interviews. Even companies like Meta and Google do system design for a maximum of 30 minutes. The question was mostly around microservices, message queues, and data aggregation.

After that interview, I decided not to go any step further. It clearly exposed the type of culture that is harmful.

System design solution to aggregate exchange rate data in real time and provide a report for 24hrs aggregation.