How Visa Interviews in 2026: Process, Questions & What They Score

• Design an LRU cache. Walk through the data structures, write the pseudocode, and give the time and space complexity of each operation.Hash map plus doubly linked list for O(1) get and put; asked in a 2025 candidate loop and listed by two coaching guides.
• Detect whether a linked list contains a cycle.Floyd's fast and slow pointer detection; a 2025 candidate solved it that way and a coaching guide lists the same problem.
• Given a stream of request logs, identify the IP addresses that exceed a request threshold within a sliding time window.Sliding window counting keyed by IP with a hash map; the same theme returns as the rate limiter design prompt.
• Solve Trapping Rain Water.Two-pointer or prefix maximum scan over an array; listed among commonly reported Visa DSA problems.
• Solve Coin Change.Bottom-up 1D dynamic programming over amounts; dynamic programming is a recurring online assessment theme.
• Find the K closest points to the origin.Max-heap of size k or quickselect; heap and priority queue questions recur in Visa loops.
• Given an n by n grid of 1s and 0s, return the number of islands.BFS or DFS flood fill over a grid; listed by two independent coaching guides as a Visa coding question.
• Count all substrings of length 3 that contain at least one vowel.Fixed-size sliding window over a string; from a 70-minute CodeSignal assessment in a 2025 new-grad loop.
• Given two strings, determine whether you can form the second from the first using operations such as swap and replace.Character frequency reasoning; the candidate's buggy sort was rewritten from scratch and accepted, so visible recovery is survivable.
• Print the level-order traversal of a binary tree with alternate levels reversed.Zigzag BFS with a queue and per-level reversal; from a 60-minute technical round in a 2024 new-grad loop.
• Check whether a string of parentheses is valid without using a stack.Counter-based validation; a constraint-added variant that removes the obvious data structure.
• Remove from the first string every character that is not present in the second string.Set membership filtering over a string; same 2024 loop as the parentheses variant.
• Given a string, print or count all of its palindromic substrings.Expand around center or substring DP; asked in a 2024 campus round and listed by a coaching guide.
• Write a function that validates whether a sequence of transactions follows the required state machine transitions, for example Authorized to Captured to Settled.Finite state machine validation over a sequence; knowing the authorization to settlement lifecycle helps you ask the right questions.

Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.

• Design a global payment notification system.Multi-region fan-out messaging; tests delivery guarantees, retries and idempotency.
• Design a fraud detection service that evaluates transaction risk in under 50 milliseconds.Latency-budgeted streaming design; reported by two independent sources, one with the explicit 50 millisecond bound.
• Design a payment gateway that handles millions of transactions per second.Throughput, fault tolerance and idempotent processing at scale; reported as a core Visa system design prompt.
• Design a distributed ledger for tracking loyalty points that must be updated synchronously across multiple regions.Consistency versus availability under a synchronous multi-region write constraint.
• Design a scalable shopping website with a content management system. How would you handle traffic spikes, make API calls efficient, update dynamic content, and test it?Web-scale architecture with four follow-ups on traffic, API efficiency, dynamic content and testing, all in one hour-long round.
• Design an order delivery system: give the schema, define the API routes, and write the SQL queries behind them.Low-level design ending in a concrete schema, REST routes and SQL; asked in a 2025 loop and listed as a guide scenario.
• Design a rate limiter.Token bucket or sliding window and where the counter lives when distributed; listed by a guide and asked in a 2025 loop.
• Design a URL shortener.Key generation, storage choice and redirect scaling; a 2025 experienced hire designed Tiny URL end to end.
• Design an elevator system (low-level design, classes and state transitions).Object-oriented class design and state transitions; library management and hit counter variants are reported too.
• How would you design a highly available payment system? What security risks does a payment system face and how would you mitigate them?Availability design plus threat modeling and mitigations, asked as two adjacent questions for payments roles.
• Design a CI/CD pipeline from GitHub Actions through to a Kubernetes deployment.Pipeline stages, artifact promotion and rollout strategy; infrastructure design sits alongside product design.
• What is the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling, and how would you synchronize ticket booking across multiple locations in a rail booking app?Scaling models plus distributed locking or transactions for concurrent bookings; from a 2024 on-campus loop.

Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.

• What are the four pillars of OOP? Explain the difference between encapsulation and abstraction, and describe virtual functions and the diamond problem.Core OOP vocabulary and multiple inheritance; the most repeated fundamentals topic across five candidate reports and a guide.
• Walk me through the SSL handshake. What is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS, and how does an SSL certificate actually establish trust?TLS handshake, certificate chain of trust and HTTPS; reported by a coaching guide and a 2025 candidate.
• What is the difference between multithreading and multiprocessing, and between a process and a thread? What are the conditions for deadlock?OS concurrency basics and the four deadlock conditions; process versus thread appears in at least five candidate reports.
• Explain the difference between monolithic and microservices architecture, and when you would still choose a monolith.Architecture trade-offs and service boundaries; asked in a 2024 campus round and probed by a 2025 hiring manager.
• What is the difference between encryption and hashing, and when would you use each?Reversible versus one-way transforms and their use cases; asked in a lead round alongside behavioral questions.
• Given this schema, write a query that joins across tables, for example the total order cost per customer over the past month.Multi-table JOINs with aggregation; one candidate started with a subquery and was steered to JOINs.
• What is caching and why is it used? Explain write-back versus write-through and the common cache replacement policies.Cache write policies and eviction such as LRU; asked in two separate 2025 Bangalore new-grad loops.
• Explain REST APIs. How do you create one, and what are the alternatives?HTTP verbs, resources and status codes plus GraphQL or gRPC alternatives; asked in 2024 and 2025 loops.
• Explain common design patterns with real-world examples, including Singleton.Pattern recognition and implementation detail such as a thread-safe Singleton; from a 2024 campus and a 2025 experienced loop.
• Explain the stages of the SDLC, and the difference between SDLC and STLC.Process knowledge rather than coding; appears in three separate campus reports, usually in the final technical or HR round.
• Walk me through the technologies on your resume. Why did you choose this framework, and what are its advantages and drawbacks?Trade-off reasoning on your own stack; reported drills cover SpringBoot, JWT, caching, React, Docker, AWS, MongoDB and Flask.

Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.

• Tell me about a time you influenced a team without having authority over it.
• Describe a mistake you made and how you overcame it.
• Tell me about a time you worked on a project that did not go as expected.
• How have you dealt with a hardship or something going wrong with a client?
• Describe the most impactful project you have worked on.
• Scenario: the deadline is tomorrow, but the focus is on maintaining existing code. What would you do?
• Describe a time you identified a performance bottleneck in a critical production path. How did you validate your hypothesis before applying a fix?
• Tell me about a time you had to balance rapid feature delivery against the technical debt of a legacy system. How did you decide what to refactor?
• How do you balance collaboration with independent thinking?
• Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical lead. How did you handle it?
• Tell me about a time you handled a production incident.
• Tell me about a time you had to pick up an unfamiliar technology or learn something independently to deliver a project.

• Why do you want to work at Visa?
• Tell me about yourself.
• Visa processes billions of transactions with high availability requirements. Which technical challenges in high-throughput financial systems interest you most, and why?
• Where do you see yourself in five years?
• Why do you think we should not hire you?
• What types of team members do you find difficult to work with?
• Case exercise: here is a payment industry scenario with limited data. Analyze the issue, identify the key issues, develop a strategy, and present your recommendation.
• Estimate the daily number of transactions in the US.
• What key metrics would you track for a payment system, and how would you identify bottlenecks in a payment processing workflow?Analytics question for business analyst roles; tests metric selection such as approval rate and latency, and workflow diagnosis.

Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.

Visa's process has 10 stages, in order: Application and resume screen, Online assessment (technology roles), Game-based assessment (early careers and graduate schemes), Recruiter screen, Technical interview 1, Technical interview 2 (design plus resume deep dive), Hiring manager / behavioral round, Assessment centre (graduate and non-engineering early careers), Case study round (Visa Consulting and Analytics track), Offer and decision.

Visa evaluates candidates against Visa Leadership Principles: Lead courageously, Act like an owner, Think big and challenge the status quo, Hold ourselves and each other accountable, Obsess about customers, Listen and learn from customers, Dream, design, and build the future of payments, Sell with pride and purpose, Collaborate as one Visa, Champion inclusion and diversity, Encourage constructive debate, Enable each other to succeed, Execute with excellence, Decide quickly and move fast, Deliver seamlessly, Learn from our mistakes.

Visa's question bank spans 5 categories: Coding and algorithms; System and low-level design; CS fundamentals and payments technology; Behavioral and Leadership Principles; Motivation, fit and case.

This playbook is medium confidence, compiled from 30 public sources, and last verified September 5, 2026. It describes one well-documented shape of Visa's interviews, not a guarantee of what any individual loop will look like.