Just finished the Visa SWE loop for a backend role at their Foster City office. Sharing because I wish I'd had better info going in.
The process started with a HackerRank online assessment. Two coding problems, 90 minutes. The first was a medium-tier graph problem (BFS, nothing exotic). The second was a string manipulation problem that felt closer to easy-medium. Both were solvable with pretty standard LeetCode patterns, no tricks, no fancy data structures. I used Python and had about 25 minutes to spare.
Important note: the OA is proctored. Camera on, screen share. Not a big deal but know ahead of time.
After the OA, there was a 30-minute phone screen with a recruiter (more on that in another thread), and then a full virtual onsite. The onsite coding round was one problem per session across two separate sessions with SWE interviewers. The problems were medium difficulty. One was array manipulation with a time-complexity constraint, and one was a tree problem where they cared about the recursive breakdown and edge cases. Neither was a LeetCode hard.
What I noticed about Visa's coding style: they are not trying to stump you with obscure algorithms. They want to see clean code, legible variable names, you talking through your thinking, and that you catch edge cases yourself instead of waiting for hints. One interviewer literally said "think out loud, I'm not timing your silence."
Overall difficulty: easier than Google or Stripe coding, roughly on par with mid-level fintech shops. Prep at medium difficulty, know your graph traversals and tree recursion cold, and you'll be fine for the OA and the onsite coding sessions.
The behavioral portion is separate (different sessions), so you won't be asked "tell me about a conflict" in the same breath as your coding. That's actually a plus.