Nick’s previously held Software & Data roles at Facebook, Google, & SafeGraph (a geospatial analytics startup).
Currently, he’s the best-selling author of Ace the Data Science Interview, and Founder & CEO of DataLemur.
Nick’s also active on LinkedIn, where he shares career tips with his 160,000+ followers.
At Remitly, SQL is often used to look at transaction data to find fraud and improve customer service by making the best use of remittance flow patterns. As you might expect, this is why Remitly usually tests candidates for Data Analytics, Data Science, and Data Engineering jobs with SQL queries.
So, here are 8 Remitly SQL interview questions to help you prepare for the real thing. How many can you answer correctly?
Remitly is one of the fastest growing fintech companies, providing online remittance services that make it easier for immigrants to send money internationally With its innovative technology, competitive pricing, and focus on customer experience, Remitly has quickly become a leader in the digital remittance space
As Remitly continues to expand, competition for jobs is increasing. To stand out from other applicants, you should learn about the company and practice answering common interview questions before the real thing. There are 30 questions that you are likely to be asked during your Remitly interview. This guide includes tips on how to ace your answers.
Company Overview
- Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington
- Empowers immigrants to send money internationally through its digital platform
- Raised over $420 million in funding and valued at over $1.5 billion
- Processed over $6 billion in remittance volume as of 2018
- Expanded services to over 3,500 corridors in more than 50 countries
- Known for fast transfer speeds, competitive pricing, and excellent customer service
Remitly’s Hiring Process
The Remitly hiring process typically follows these stages:
- Initial screening call with a recruiter
- Technical phone interview focusing on your programming skills
- Take home coding assignment relevant to the role
- Virtual interviews with hiring manager and team members
- Interview with senior leadership
Throughout the process, Remitly assesses both technical competency and cultural fit. They look for smart, driven individuals who embody the company’s values. Demonstrating your passion for Remitly’s mission is key. The process is rigorous but candidates describe the experience as positive and organized.
Most Common Remitly Interview Questions
Here are the top 30 questions candidates report being asked during Remitly interviews with tips for crafting winning responses
Technical Questions
- How would you go about optimizing the performance of a money transfer application?
- Showcase expertise in application performance and capacity planning
- Discuss strategies like improving algorithms, implementing caching, scaling infrastructure
- Emphasize importance of load testing, monitoring, and continuous optimization
- Explain how you would design a system that allows users to easily track the status of money transfers.
- Highlight experience designing solutions for financial services
- Discuss tracking status in real-time through transaction IDs and push notifications
- Consider ease of integration with existing banking/financial systems
- Emphasize data security, privacy, and compliance best practices
- What techniques would you use to ensure the reliability and resiliency of Remitly’s services?
- Point to expertise in building robust, fault-tolerant systems
- Discuss redundancy, effective error-handling, extensive monitoring
- Highlight experience with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems
- Share examples of how you’ve built reliable services in past roles
- How would you improve the speed and efficiency of Remitly’s money transfer process?
- Show deep understanding of remittance transaction flow and bottlenecks
- Suggest optimizations like improved algorithms, distributed ledgers, parallel transfers
- Discuss intelligently leveraging banking/swift networks
- Emphasize importance of testing and benchmarking improvements
- What strategies would you implement to scale Remitly’s platform as our user base grows exponentially?
- Demonstrate experience designing scalable systems
- Discuss lifting and shifting to cloud, adding capacity, database sharding
- Highlight expertise in large scale data architecture patterns
- Emphasize continuously monitoring and fine-tuning architecture
- How would you ensure data quality and integrity as Remitly ingests data from multiple external sources?
- Share approaches like schema validation, error handling, automated testing
- Discuss building robust integration testing frameworks to validate new data flows
- Highlight experience implementing controls/checks at ingestion
- Emphasize criticality of high quality data for remittance services
- How would you improve the sign-up and transaction flows in the Remitly mobile app?
- Show expertise in designing intuitive, user-friendly mobile interfaces
- Discuss importance of usability studies, customer feedback, A/B testing
- Suggest streamlining forms, reducing fields, pre-filling data to improve speed
- Share examples of how you’ve improved UX for finance apps before
- What techniques would you use to detect fraud and prevent abuse in Remitly’s services?
- Discuss fraud detection strategies like analyzing usage patterns to flag anomalies
- Highlight experience building machine learning models to identify suspicious behavior
- Suggest combining rule-based and ML approaches to balance speed and accuracy
- Emphasize criticality of fraud prevention and your passion for this problem space
- How would you go about debugging a performance issue in Remitly’s transaction processing pipeline?
- Walk through systematic debugging approach like instrumentation, logs analysis
- Discuss identifying bottlenecks, drilling down to root cause, replicating issue
- Highlight your proficiency with debugging tools and techniques
- Provide examples of successful debugging experiences
- What are some key API design principles you would follow for a fintech product like Remitly?
- Emphasize importance of security, stability, scalability and performance
- Discuss versioning schemes, error handling mechanisms, request throttling
- Highlight experience building fintech APIs and importance of clear documentation
- Share how you ensured your APIs aligned with product needs in past roles
Behavioral Questions
- Tell me about a time you successfully led a technology project from concept to launch. What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
- Share a relevant experience showcasing leadership and project management skills
- Discuss challenges faced and how you rallied your team to find solutions
- Emphasize outcomes like improved customer experience, engagement, or revenue
- Describe a situation where you had to collaborate with various internal teams to solve a technical challenge. How did you ensure alignment and drive results?
- Provide an example highlighting cross-functional teamwork
- Discuss communication strategies used to get buy-in and coordinate workflows
- Emphasize outcomes like improved systems, efficiencies or capabilities
- Tell me about a time you had to rapidly diagnose and troubleshoot an issue in production. What was the business impact and how did you prioritize fixing it?
- Share an example showcasing calmly handling pressure and methodically solving complex issues
- Quantify business impact and how you urgently coordinated resources to address it
- Emphasize how you kept stakeholders updated and managed expectations
- Describe a situation where you had to adapt quickly to changing priorities and manage competing deadlines. How did you handle this and deliver results?
- Provide real example of agilely responding to shifting needs as a team player
- Discuss how you re-prioritized, coordinated with stakeholders, managed expectations
- Highlight outcomes demonstrating ability to deliver under pressure
- Tell me about a time you faced opposition to a design or technical solution you created. How did you respond?
- Share an example showcasing openness to feedback and communicating ideas
- Discuss how you listened, understood concerns and found compromises
- Highlight how you remained cool under pressure and focused on an optimal outcome
- Describe a difficult troubleshooting or debugging experience you faced. What made it challenging and how did you stay focused on finding a solution?
- Provide real example showcasing perseverance and creative problem-solving
- Discuss complexities and unknowns faced while debugging
- Emphasize systematic approach to isolating issues and your determination
- Tell me about a time you had to rapidly learn a new technology or skillset with minimal guidance. How did you accomplish this?
- Share example highlighting self-motivation and ability to independently pick up new skills
- Discuss your learning approach, information sources leveraged, and strategies applied
- Emphasize speed at which you became proficient and value delivered
- Describe a time when you had to collaborate with team members who had different work styles than you. How did you navigate this?
- Provide real example showcasing emotional intelligence and communication skills
- Discuss how you adapted your style, found common ground, and achieved shared goals
- Emphasize outcomes highlighting ability to work cohesively across styles
- Tell me about a time you took initiative to implement a process improvement. What motivated this and what results did it drive?
- Share example showcasing proactive mindset and creative problem-solving
- Discuss how you analyzed existing processes, identified issues, and proposed solutions
- Quantify positive outcomes around productivity, cost, quality, or efficiency
- Describe a time when you had to convince others to adopt a new technology, tool, or approach you recommended. How did you influence them?
- Provide real example highlighting your influencer and change management skills
- Discuss data-driven business case presented, stakeholders managed, and value emphasized
- Share positive outcomes like productivity or performance gains
- Tell me about a challenging situation you faced while collaborating with engineering and design teams. How did you overcome this?
- Share example highlighting empathy, conflict
8 Remitly SQL Interview Questions
As a data scientist at Remitly, it’s your job to look at the company’s past money transfer transactions and figure out what they mean. Your job is to write an SQL query that will find out how much money each sender sent all together, how much money they sent on average per transaction, and how they rank based on how much money they sent all together.
Below is a sample data from the table:
| transaction_id | sender_id | receiver_id | transfer_date | amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1001 | 1 | 101 | 2022-06-08 | 500 |
| 1002 | 2 | 102 | 2022-06-10 | 200 |
| 1003 | 1 | 103 | 2022-06-18 | 300 |
| 1004 | 3 | 104 | 2022-07-26 | 1000 |
| 1005 | 3 | 105 | 2022-07-05 | 500 |
| 1006 | 2 | 106 | 2022-08-01 | 100 |
| 1007 | 2 | 107 | 2022-08-20 | 1000 |
| 1008 | 1 | 108 | 2022-09-04 | 1500 |
This query is broken down into two main parts:
- In the first part (total_transfers), an aggregate function is used to find out how much money each sender sent in total and on average.
- The second part, sender_ranks, uses a window function to give each sender a rank based on how much money they sent. The RANK() function is used to provide this ranking. The results are then selected from the ranking table.
For more window function practice, try this Uber SQL problem within DataLemurs online SQL code editor:
SQL Question 6: Calculate Average Transaction Value per Country
Remitly is a digital remittance service, enabling users to send money to others in different countries. Can you write an SQL query that will find the average value of all the transactions sent to each country each month given a table of these transactions?
Please identify the month in the format YYYY-MM. Assume the table has the following schema:
| transaction_id | user_id | send_date | send_country | receive_country | amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1750 | 101 | 2022-08-02 00:00:00 | US | PH | 200.00 |
| 2206 | 202 | 2022-08-10 00:00:00 | US | MX | 150.00 |
| 3094 | 303 | 2022-08-18 00:00:00 | US | PH | 250.00 |
| 4582 | 404 | 2022-09-05 00:00:00 | US | MX | 200.00 |
| 5397 | 505 | 2022-09-08 00:00:00 | US | PH | 300.00 |
This query first groups the transactions by both month (with year) and the receiving country. It then calculates the average transaction value to each country per month using the AVG() function. Finally, it orders the output by month and average amount in descending order.
| month | receive_country | avg_amount |
|---|---|---|
| 2022-08 | PH | 225.00 |
| 2022-08 | MX | 150.00 |
| 2022-09 | PH | 300.00 |
| 2022-09 | MX | 200.00 |
In August 2022, the average amount sent to the Philippines (PH) was 225 and to Mexico (MX) was 225. The average amount sent to Mexico (MX) was 225 and to Philippines (PH) was 150.
Remitly Review (2024)
FAQ
Why do you want to work for Remitly?
What is the interview process like at Remitly?
I interviewed at Remitly altogether four rounds, including a people interview, a hiring manager interview and a meeting with teammates. The meeting with teammates is quite technical, they asked about specific questions on paid social, paid search, etc I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Remitly in Mar 2023
How did the recruiter’s interview go?
Recruiter asked questions and then provided time for applicant questions. The recruiter was cordial during the interview, and it went well enough. Recruiter did not bother to reach out afterwards to close the loop on yes/no, even when applicant reached out seeking courtesy/professional follow-up.
How do I filter interviews?
To filter interviews, Sign In or Register. Your trust is our top concern, so companies can’t alter or remove interviews. Starts with an HR screening round followed by Hiring Manager rounds. Hiring Manager rounds have more behavioral questions and product sense or design type Qs. HR rounds have the understanding situation type Qs.
