Wayfair Interview Experience | SDE 2 | Selected

I was initially contacted by a recruiter from Instahyre who provided an overview of the SDE 2 role and compensation details. Once I confirmed my interest, the interview process quickly began.

Online Assessment (Hackerrank)

The online assessment consisted of two mid-to-hard LeetCode-style questions. The difficulty was moderate to high, challenging my problem-solving skills and my ability to handle various edge cases. I successfully cleared this round.

Round 1 – Design Round (Hackerrank Platform)

This round involved a design task on the Hackerrank platform where I was asked to design an Order Management System. Some classes and interfaces were pre-provided, and my task was to implement the missing functionalities. After completing the coding, there was a follow-up discussion about my approach, the design decisions I made, and the complexity of my solution.

Round 2 – Application Design Round

In this round, I was tasked with designing a Bike Rental System. The discussion primarily focused on API Design, Database Schema Design, and explaining the system flow using a Sequence Diagram. Additionally, I was asked to write SQL queries to fetch available vehicles, fetch booked vehicles, and identify overdue rentals. I cleared this round and received an invitation for the onsite interviews.

Round 3 – Onsite Interviews

The onsite interviews were conducted with multiple engineering managers.

1. Hiring Manager (Engineering Manager) – 45 mins

This discussion covered my current project and responsibilities, followed by resume-based technical questions. We also delved into Spring Boot concepts such as Beans, Transactions, and REST design principles, as well as deployment strategies and scaling practices.

2. Senior Engineering Manager – 15 mins

This was a shorter round where I discussed 'Why Wayfair?' and how I handle challenges, deadlines, and team collaboration.

Round 4 – HR Discussion (30 mins)

This round focused on salary negotiation, cultural fitment, and general behavioral questions.

Additional Round

About a week later, HR informed me that the original position I applied for had been closed, but they wanted to consider me for another team. They scheduled an additional 1-hour discussion with another Hiring Manager. This round included a deep dive into my current project and a detailed discussion on my database design choices and the reasoning behind them.

Outcome

Although the entire process took some time due to internal organizational changes, my overall experience with Wayfair was structured and professional. They placed a strong emphasis on design skills, clean architecture thinking, and practical real-world application knowledge, which I appreciated. I received an offer for the SDE 2 role.