Wayve Application Software Engineer in Leonberg: factorial three ways, a hiring manager chat and a self-driving simulation system design

I applied through an employee referral for the Leonberg office and interviewed for the Application Software Engineer role at Wayve. The whole process end to end took about three weeks.

The loop was 6 main rounds:

• Recruiter Screen:

  • Standard initial chat covering background, timeline, and basic alignment.

• Technical Screen:

  • First question was to implement a function to calculate the factorial of a number recursively. Then same again iteratively. Then implement it without using the multiplication operator. They asked to explain time and space complexity each time. Added edge case checks for invalid inputs like negatives, non integers. Asked to explain the complexity of implementing multiplication through repeated addition, and how to cache previously calculated results if the function were called repeatedly.

• Hiring Manager Chat:

  • Resume questions about my past projects, team fit, and expectations.

• Onsite - System Design:

  • I was asked to design a system that tests self-driving models in a simulator across millions of scenarios, like roundabouts or bad weather, to make sure they're safe for real roads. I had to figure out how to run all these 30-second simulation loops fast and cheaply while generating safety scorecards and saving replay data.

• Onsite - 2 x Behavioral Rounds:

  • Going over past achievements, collaboration, communication and technical ownership. For these I just made sure I answered with STAR format and had a bunch of answers prepared from the behavioral playbook here.