Mastercard interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Mastercard software engineering interview across 4 levels and 16 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Mastercard salary & ratings · All interview processes

Software Development Engineer (SDE) Summer Intern

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: On-campus drives Jul-Sep for the following summer; compresse · Recommended prep: 3-6 weeks

  1. Round 0: Online Coding Assessment (OA)

    Assessment · ~60 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: Valid Parentheses — Given a string containing only the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid. Brackets must be closed by the same type and in the correct order. Print 'true' or 'false'.

  2. Round 1: Hackathon 'Code for Change' (Pune campuses, since 2024)

    Other · ~1 day · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview 1

    Onsite · ~30-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Valid Anagram — Given two strings s and t (one per line), return whether t is an anagram of s (same characters with the same frequency). Print 'true' or 'false'.

  4. Round 3: Technical Interview 2 + HR

    Onsite · ~30-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Decode String — Given an encoded string of the form k[encoded_string] where the bracketed content is repeated k times (nesting allowed), return the decoded string. Example: 3[a2[c]] -> accaccacc.

Software Engineer (SDE I / SDE II, incl. campus)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / TA Screen

    Phone · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank/Codility)

    Assessment · ~60-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Valid Parentheses — Given a string containing only the characters '()[]{}', determine whether the brackets are validly matched and correctly nested. Print true or false.

  3. Round 2: Technical Round 1 - Fundamentals & Coding

    Phone · ~50-60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Decode String — Given an encoded string of the form k[encoded_string] (e.g. 3[a]2[bc]), return its decoded expansion. Encodings may be nested, e.g. 3[a2[c]] -> accaccacc. Input k is a positive integer.

  4. Round 3: Technical Round 2 - Design/OOP + HR (often combined)

    Onsite · ~20-60 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

Senior Software Engineer (L7)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~4-8 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / TA Screen

    Phone · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical Screen / OA - DSA

    Assessment · ~45-60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Convert a Number to Words (Integer to English Words) — Given a non-negative 32-bit integer, convert it to its English-words representation, e.g. 1234567 -> "One Million Two Hundred Thirty Four Thousand Five Hundred Sixty Seven". Handle grouping edge cases and zero.

  3. Round 2: Technical Loop - Coding + LLD/HLD + System Design

    System_design · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a real-time transaction-history viewer — Design a system that lets millions of cardholders view their transaction history in real time. Discuss ingestion of the transaction stream, read/write path separation, caching and pagination, consistency vs freshness, and how you scale to millions of users while keeping latency low and supporting rollback of a bad deploy.

  4. Round 3: Bar Raiser / Final - Resume Deep-Dive + Behavioral (Decency Quotient)

    Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Lead / Principal Software Engineer

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~5-8 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: No official cooldown published (LOW confidence).

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / Hiring-Manager Screen

    Phone · ~30-45 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical Screen - Coding/DSA

    Phone · ~45-60 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Top K Frequent Elements (top-N frequent log messages at scale) — Given an integer array and an integer k, return the k most frequent elements. Lead framing: 'given a very large log file, efficiently find the top 10 most frequent error messages' — discuss the streaming/external-memory variant when the data does not fit in RAM.

  3. Round 2: Architecture Superday - System Design + Code Review + Business Modeling + API Design

    System_design · ~45-60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Migrate a monolith to microservices with zero downtime — You own a large payments monolith. Design the migration to microservices without downtime: service decomposition and bounded contexts, strangler-fig routing, data ownership and dual-writes, distributed transaction management (saga vs 2PC) across services, API gateway, and rollback strategy. Justify which pieces stay monolithic.

  4. Round 3: Final - Director/Principal Behavioral (Decency Quotient) + Bar Raiser

    Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Other companies' interview processes

Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.