Visa · Primly Community

Went through the full Visa SWE loop last month. Here's what actually happened.

backend_bekah · 5 replies

Did the full loop for a mid-level SWE role on their payments infrastructure team, so here's the debrief.

Recruiter screen: 30 min, pretty standard. They asked about my fintech background, why Visa, and walked me through the process. Recruiter was organized and sent an agenda doc beforehand, which I appreciated.

Technical phone screen: 45 min with a Leetcode medium. Mine was a sliding window problem. Nothing exotic. Interviewer was quiet but not cold, just heads-down.

Virtual onsite (4 rounds): Coding round 1: graph traversal, BFS/DFS variant. Asked me to think aloud about edge cases involving disconnected nodes. Coding round 2: more of a design-and-implement situation. They gave me a partial API spec and asked me to code a transaction validator. This felt more on-theme for what they actually build. System design: design a payment retry system with idempotency guarantees. This was the most interesting round. They pushed hard on exactly-once delivery and what happens when the downstream bank times out. Behavioral: pretty standard STAR questions. One about a time I navigated a disagreement with a stakeholder, one about dealing with ambiguous requirements.

What surprised me: the interviewers all had pretty deep domain knowledge. Not just reading from a script. The system design interviewer had clearly thought about these problems in production.

Got an offer 12 days after the final round. Negotiation was doable but not generous.

5 replies

de_derek

the transaction validator coding round sounds like something i'd actually fail on autopilot. did they want you to handle currency conversion edge cases or was it more about the validation logic itself?

backend_bekah

mostly validation logic. things like duplicate transaction IDs, amounts out of range for the currency, missing required fields. currency conversion didn't come up but honestly would've been more interesting.

visa_vik

12 days to offer, that's actually fast. i've heard Visa can take 3-4 weeks post-onsite. was there anything you did to speed it up, like following up proactively?

backend_bekah

i sent a thank-you note to the recruiter the day after, and then a check-in on day 8. i think the check-in helped. recruiter replied same day and said decision was pending one more calibration. offer came 4 days later.

corp_refugee

idempotency question in system design is basically table stakes at any payments company. good that they're asking it. means the team has touched real production pain. the companies that don't ask it are the ones you find out about later.