Visa interview process (2026)
Round-by-round breakdown of the Visa software engineering interview across 4 levels and 19 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.
Software Engineer Intern (Summer / 2-6 month, India)
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~1-3 weeks · Recommended prep: 3-5 weeks · Cooldown: No formally published intern cooldown; candidates who fail t
-
Round 0: Online Assessment (CodeSignal)
Assessment · ~70 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank
Sample question: Maximum Subarray — Given an integer array, find the contiguous subarray (containing at least one number) that has the largest sum, and return that sum. Handle all-negative arrays correctly.
-
Round 1: Technical Interview (code-pair + CS fundamentals + projects)
Onsite · 45-50 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Number of Islands — Given an n x m grid of '1' (land) and '0' (water), count the number of islands. An island is a maximal group of land cells connected 4-directionally (up/down/left/right).
-
Round 2: HR / Behavioral
Behavioral · ~10-15 min · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
-
Round 3: Offer
Offer · ~2 weeks
Mode of interview: Offer discussion
Software Engineer (incl. New Grad / SDE)
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months
-
Round 0: Online Assessment (CodeSignal; some legacy HackerRank)
Assessment · 70-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Number of Islands — Given an m x n 2D binary grid of '1' (land) and '0' (water), return the number of islands. An island is formed by connecting adjacent lands horizontally or vertically.
-
Round 1: Recruiter Screen / Pre-Placement Talk
Phone · 30-45 min · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
-
Round 2: Technical Round 1 (DSA + fundamentals)
Onsite · 30-60 min · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Group Anagrams — Given an array of strings, group the anagrams together. Two strings are anagrams if one is a rearrangement of the other's letters.
-
Round 3: Technical Round 2 (language + projects)
Onsite · 45-70 min · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Merge Intervals — Given an array of intervals where intervals[i] = [start, end], merge all overlapping intervals and return the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the input intervals.
-
Round 4: Hiring Manager / Lead / Managerial Round
Behavioral · 30-45 min · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
-
Round 5: HR Discussion
Offer · 20-30 min
Mode of interview: Offer discussion
Senior Software Engineer
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~4-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months
-
Round 0: Online Assessment (CodeSignal)
Assessment · 70-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: LRU Cache — Design a data structure for a Least Recently Used cache with capacity C. Support get(key) returning the value or -1, and put(key,value) which inserts/updates and evicts the least-recently-used key when over capacity. Both operations must run in O(1) average time.
-
Round 1: Behavioral / Managerial Round (STAR)
Behavioral · 30-45 min · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
-
Round 2: Technical Round - Coding/DSA
Onsite · 45-60 min · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Search in Rotated Sorted Array — Given a sorted array of distinct integers rotated at an unknown pivot, and a target value, return the index of target in O(log n) time, or -1 if not present.
-
Round 3: System Design Round
System_design · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a rate limiter / API gateway for payment APIs — Design an API gateway with a rate limiter that fronts Visa's transaction APIs handling thousands of requests per second. Cover the limiting algorithm (token bucket vs sliding window), where counters live (local vs distributed Redis), per-client vs global limits, handling bursts, and the availability-vs-accuracy tradeoff under partition.
Staff Software Engineer
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~4-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-month
-
Round 0: Online Assessment (Coding)
Assessment · 70 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Trapping Rain Water — Given n non-negative integers representing an elevation map where the width of each bar is 1, compute how much water it can trap after raining.
-
Round 1: Technical Round 1 (Frontend/language depth)
Onsite · 60 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: 3Sum — Given an integer array, return all unique triplets [a,b,c] such that a+b+c==0. The solution set must not contain duplicate triplets.
-
Round 2: Technical Round 2 / HLD (Backend + System Design)
System_design · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a real-time fraud detection system for card transactions — Design a system that scores every card transaction for fraud in real time at Visa scale (tens of thousands of TPS, sub-100ms budget). Cover ingestion (Kafka), a streaming scorer (Flink/Spark Streaming), a feature store, low-latency model inference with caching, an approve/decline/alert decision path with manual override, and the latency-vs-accuracy and consistency-vs-availability tradeoffs.
-
Round 3: Hiring Manager / Managerial Round
Behavioral · ~45 min · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
-
Round 4: HR Discussion
Offer · 20-30 min
Mode of interview: Offer discussion
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.