went through the Visa frontend engineer interview loop a few months ago for a senior role out of their Foster City office. sharing the breakdown because i didn't find much specific info when i was prepping.
the process was 5 rounds total after a recruiter screen:
round 1: online assessment two leetcode-style problems on HackerRank, medium difficulty. one array manipulation, one string parsing. no dom or css, just pure algo. 75 minutes. i finished with about 10 minutes to spare but it wasn't easy.
round 2: phone screen with a senior eng this was actually mostly frontend-specific. they asked me to walk through how the browser renders a page (critical rendering path, paint, composite), how i'd approach lazy loading images in a performance-sensitive checkout flow, and one medium LC problem at the end. felt like a real conversation, not a gotcha.
rounds 3-5: virtual onsite Visa moved theirs to virtual permanently, fyi. three back-to-back panels: coding: one harder algo problem (~LC medium-hard), plus a frontend design question where i had to build a paginated table component from scratch. they cared about accessibility and keyboard nav, which i wasn't expecting. system design: design a real-time fraud alert dashboard for merchants. they wanted to hear about websocket vs polling tradeoffs, state management under high event volume, and how you'd handle partial data failures gracefully. very fintech-specific. behavioral: standard STAR format. "tell me about a time a project shipped late," "how do you influence stakeholders without authority." nothing wild.
my experience overall: the interviewers were solid, not trying to trick anyone. timeline was about 5 weeks start to offer. Visa's process felt more structured than startups but less brutal than big tech.
one thing i was surprised by: they asked specifically about my experience with accessibility standards. WCAG came up twice. if you're applying, know your aria-label, role attributes, and keyboard event handling.
comp was in the $175-190k base range for senior in Foster City, plus equity which felt modest compared to pure-play tech. overall a good experience even though i didn't take the offer.