I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Wayfair (Boston, MA) in Aug 2019
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter and after a quick call with them was invited to a follow-up screen call. The screen round took 1.5 hours and consisted of 30 min behavioral part ("Tell me about the time...") and 1 hour technical part. Technical part was live coding via Codility, it included two parts: a relatively simple coding task using your language of choice (string manipulation) and a quick SQL exercise (list of employees with max salary from each department).
Couple of days after the screen they invited me to onsite interview. The onsite took about 5 hours and had the following sections, 1 hour each:
- A deep dive in your past experience followed by a whiteboard system design question (Tiny URL)
- 1:1 behavioral with hiring manager (your past experience, difficult situations, etc)
- lunch
- Whiteboard coding round (Create a shipping tracking service)
- A mid-brief with the recruiter (How it's going so far, how serious I am to accept their potential offer and so on)
- Whiteboard database design (DVD renting system)
- Final debrief with the recruiter
During the whole process since the very first call they have been very polite and accommodating, maybe with a rare exceptions in a couple of cases from the onsite when the interviewing engineers were slightly distracted. The company employs a full army of recruiters and tends to switch you from one to another as you proceed further, but in most cases the transition went smooth. Unfortunately, all these good manners seem to disappear if they decide against you: I received a short courtesy call saying that they won't proceed further but can't tell me why. My follow-up question about which area to improve for a better fit in the future was left unanswered, which I think is not very professional.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Given a string that represents truck load/unload journal, identify final total weight of boxes. Format: [+-]NbW, where N - number of boxes(optional), W - weight of a box. Example: "b40 +3b20 -2b10 " would result in total weight of +80.
Marketing team wants a service to generate tiny URL in order to share it on Twitter for promotional and marketing purposes. Include ability to generate analytic reports such as how many times users clicked on specific tiny URL and so on.
Build a Shipping tracking service to accommodate number of suppliers (DHL, FedEx, etc) a user might want to select from and to provide a way of translating supplier-specific statuses into user-friendly format. Example: DHL "in transit" -> "Out For Delivery"; UPS "delivered" -> "Delivered".
Design database for a system where company employees can rent a DVD from a pool of movies contributed by other employees. Get a list of renters who borrowed a DVD contributed by a specific user.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Wayfair (Boston, MA) in Mar 2019
Interview
Very open and transparent process. Multiple interviews - video, phone and in-person - plus case studies. Recruiter consistently followed up as did the Hiring Manager. I was given multiple opportunities to consider.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There were no off-the-wall questions. Everything was relevant to the content of the job or behavioral - tell me about a time you XYZ...
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Wayfair (Boston, MA) in Apr 2018
Interview
This was probably not the typical review process as I was considered for two different Senior Manager roles, but there was the standard phone screen with the HR, a phone screen with a potential hiring manager, a Skype-like case study, and then an on-site round with multiple people and additional case study.
The review process is heavily data driven. Brush up on your math skills, as most interview rounds did not allow the use of a calculator.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If a product line has a 10% sale, and its profit margin is X% with $X in revenue, what would the increase in sales need to be in order to break-even?