If you’re interviewing for a senior frontend engineer position at Wise you might be invited to participate in a system design interview. Here’s a handy guide to help you prepare for our system design technical interview.

The system design interview is an open-ended exercise to help you showcase your ability to break problems down, communicate and make technical decisions.

The interview takes around 60 minutes - including 5/10 minutes for intros and to answer your questions at the end.

We will spend about 45min designing and diagraming some features or products according to a set of product requirements, mirroring a real world example.

To carry the the exercise, we’ll use an interactive diagramming platform like HackerRank or draw.io where the idea is for you to collaborate with your interviewer to design and architect the solution to exercise

Your recruiter will discuss all this with you during the initial call.

You’ll receive an email from Wise containing the details of the interview: when it’ll happen, who’ll the two engineers be and how it’ll be conducted. It can be an onsite interview where you get the opportunity to visit one of our offices (depending on your location), or a video interview via Google Meet.

Our interviewers will provide a quick introduction of themselves and tell you about their roles in Wise.

For the design task, we will present a product task or problematic area and we expect you to help us draw out a high level architecture . Additionally, we may also ask for a deep dive into specific topics of the requirements or your design as key technical choices you make, API design, UX patterns or performance concerns and trade-offs.

When approaching any technical task, we suggest the following: 

• Make sure you fully understand the question. If you are uncertain, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification.

• Begin with a simple solution and iterate to improve it. If time runs short, just explain to us how you would improve it. However, it is also acceptable to start with the best solution right away.

• Talk us through your thought process and assumptions as you tackle the problem.

Feel free to ask the interviewers for help - they are there to support you in completing the task and demonstrating your problem-solving abilities.

• For remote interviews, a stable internet connection and a quiet environment are very important. Consider using a headset for better audio quality for both yourself and the interviewers.

• Be ready to use an online collaborative whiteboard tool (e.g. Hackerrank) and to share your screen

• Ask questions - this round is an open ended discussion, we encourage you to engage with your interviewers and ask them questions to clarify any questions you have, discuss ideas and validate your design

• 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.