Engineering Lead —| London | March 2026 Process: Recruiter screen → Engineering Lead interview (stage 2) The recruiter was responsive and well-prepared. Stage 2 was a conversation with the hiring Engineering Lead covering my background, leadership experience, team management approach, handling underperformers, and motivations for joining Wise. All reasonable and relevant questions for the role. I came prepared, gave structured answers grounded in real examples from leading engineering teams across regulated financial services — Open Banking, payments modernisation, cloud-native migration. The conversation felt engaged and positive. I was told feedback would be passed to the recruiter and I'd hear about next steps. I didn't progress. No feedback was given. This was only stage 2 — I hadn't even reached the technical rounds. Being screened out at this point with no explanation of what fell short is genuinely difficult to process. A brief, honest summary of where the bar wasn't met would have been far more valuable than silence — not just for closure, but to know what to improve. Wise presents itself as a transparent, mission-driven company. That value should extend to how candidates are treated in the process, not just customers. The role and team seemed genuinely interesting. I'd still consider Wise in future — but the feedback gap is a real blind spot worth addressing.

95% slated recruitment. I got the initial 30 minutes phone call with the recruiter. After that, I was advised to schedule a call for the next stage pair programming interview on their hiring platform. I scheduled within 1-2 day. However, my interview appointment was canceled few days later. This is 1st red flag. The recruiter called me again 2 weeks later to clarify why I did not make the appointment. I told the recruiter it was canceled from your side. The recruiter rescheduled the interview for another day. On the day of the pair programming interview, it was very well. The question was a tic-tac-toe game implementation in Python. I was fine to share my full screen during the interview but the interviewer did not me to do screen sharing. It was interesting that the interviewer asked me to not use any AI tools during the interview. How come they know it if I am not sharing my screen? This is 2nd red flag. I think it is around easy to medium leetcode level. I had interaction with the interviewer and completed the coding. On the next day, I received an email from the recruiter that they decided to proceed to other candidates. The email was very generic and canned response. No specific feedback was given. Overall, this experience led me a lot of questions and not a fair process.