Negative experience, An HR call to start with, and she informed about the process which is a three step process. First an HR call, then a technical round with Hiring Manager (technical interview) and followed by Bar raiser interview. See questions in the questions section below.
In the technical interview they started with their videos turned off on the teams call, 10 minutes into the interview, they asked me to turn my camera ON? I requested the same for them, and prefereed to watch them on video while interviewing me BUT they staright away declined twice and said they are not obliged to turn their cameras on during the interview but they wanted to see me and monitor me instead. Two guys on the same account sitting togther interviewing me, both of inidan decent and i did not get who is talking when ? they both sound similar, with similar indian accent. At the end when I asked about the team and where they were located, they tried to bring in polictics to the interview and replied that: "they were sitting in Trump's country (Trump is current USA president), while there is another team sitting in Modi's country in Pune (Mr. Modi is current Indian Prime Minister)". To be honest I never asked for this, and wasn't expecting this absurd reply from them. They also bring in a question of my Nationality. I mean really? Is that the kind of work ethics Mastercard employees have? I better stay away.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The technical interviewers started with their introductions. I was expecting one person but they turned out two instead. That's fine but it should have been conveyed by HR in advance. Anyways, two people of their technical team from USA team interviewed me. They started asking a few questions from my resume. What do you know about AWS? how familiar are you with the Ansible? How would you manage the ansible playbooks? How would you validate the outputs of the Ansible playbook scripts?
then went into what do you know about API gateways. How do you manage the resiliency in the application or on at the API gateway level? Have you worked in a hybrid cloud environment? What are the tradeoffs of deploying an application to a private cloud vs the public cloud?
How does the load balancer work ? How do you know when to scale up and scale down? Asked questions on Application observability? What do you know about NGINX? Where did you used it? How NGINX is used in the API gateways? How would you secure the API gateways, specially from the unknown traffic perspective? How would you handle excessive load on the applications? How is NGINX used in API gateway architecture? How do you know when a system failure occurs ? How would you resolve a support ticket of Severity one? Where would you start from in this case? They asked about API rate limitting etc.
How do you know when a load balancer is failing in an air-gapped env?
Then, they opened up for my questions that I asked bunch of questions to them:
How does the team work ? what proportions of a team member will work on IT support, vs platform engineering, vs application development etc. Where the teams are located.
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Mastercard (Pune) in Mar 2022
Interview
Really pathetic process, I was interviewed at MasterCard where I cleared 1st round and then no communication for next 15 days. After 15 days HR called and asked for 2nd round from US counterparts which was also cleared. Now since I was already in notice period I asked them to speed up the process and even got the Letter of intent but since it was not matching my expectation, I did not accept and asked for revision after which HR said he will discuss internally and come back. The real game starts here, on a 15 mins notice he said you will get a call from US, someone from management want to have discussion, I thought it was some managerial kind of discussion but to my surprise it was a conf call with 2 new person and started asking technical questions like it was a first round of discussion, still I patiently answered but after 15 mins of call, there was a disturbance and call was disconnected abruptly. After 45 mins got msg from HR that they are not going ahead with my candidature. Never expected this from an organisation like Mastercard. Really not happy with the overall process and this last minute ditch.
