Collaboration and communication: How you communicate with your interviewers and engage with them to clarify and refine requirements to validate your ideas. We want to know how you approach working with others to break problems down and design solutions.

 Architecture and APIs: How you approach turning requirements into solutions, explain them though high level architecture diagrams and how you design the communication between components like API interfaces, at component level, network level or others.

Technical trade-offs & deep dive: How you refine your architecture to ensure it fulfills the requirements of the exercise and make technical choices. We want to see how you dive into specific parts of your solution and are able to detail how they work and why you make specific decisions and how you consider trade-offs. We want to know how you approach performance concerns and make optimisations.

What your System Design interview is about:

• Learning how you think through product and technical requirements, how you break them down and build solutions. We expect you to draw a high level architecture of your solution using a basic diagram tool and if it’s a remote interview we’ll ask you to share our screen throughout the interview.
•  We’ll ask questions about your technical decisions and go deeper into parts of your design and cover topics relevant to Wise, like application performance and good user experience and good API design. It’s an open conversation and we might not cover everything but we expect you to be able to discuss your solution with confidence and some level of detail depending on your experience

 What your System Design interview not is about:

•  Coding – this will be the focus of another interview Data models - We focus on designing data models or cover databases
•  Computer science style questions like Big O notation, Trivia questions, Riddles, trick questions or logic puzzles

This interview should not need any preparation.

We won’t ask trick questions, expect you to know big o notation or any particular computer science concept or and we won’t go into details on backend services or databases.

We will focus on high level frontend architecture concepts, technical choices and API design. Understanding your reasoning is more important than the answer itself, we want to see how you solve problems and articulate your thought process so that the interviewers understand your reasoning.

You might also want to review role-specific topics if you’ve applied for a specific position. For example, if you are applying for our security team, take some time to cover security related topics in your preparation - like frontend and API authentication mechanisms. Similarly, design system related roles should anticipate deeper questions around UI patterns, performance and accessibility.

Finally, at the conclusion of the system design interview at Wise, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. Whether about life at Wise, our global money transfer operations, or our technology stack, feel free to ask.

Good luck!