Initial Recruiter call: I was surprised to see that tech company like Wise had placed someone with graduate experience to do the initial screening for 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 for call schedule with their Sr Engineering Lead.
Hiring Manager round - Went ok, but not very sure the person really understood what it takes to solve the customer problem. But can see that the person is choking with many teams and looking for a peer. Questions are mostly around tech challenges and none towards people management.
System Design - with Sr Engineering Lead and Engineering Lead - It was more of they wanted to get you to a solution that they have in mind. 90mins non stop without a break. Suggest the leadership team to pay attention to their hiring process and would help if they can train their employees on how to do interviews. Even companies like Meta, Google does the system design to the max of 30mins.
The question was mostly around microservices, message queues and data aggregation.
After that interview, I decided not to go any step further. It clearly exposes the type of culture that is harmful.