Citibank Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview was handled by Karat, a third-party company. It started with a series of technical questions, then moved on to coding questions. While not overly difficult, I tend to work at a slower pace and could only complete the first part, which likely led to not getting the offer. The interviewer was friendly, though their strong accent occasionally made it challenging to understand them.

This was the worst interview I've had in 10 years. The interviewers had strong accents, but the process was really disorganized. They interrupted each other, and it lacked any real structure. The questions didn't seem related to the job or my background at all. We didn't talk about best practices, architecture, or anything practical. They just focused on theoretical questions with no real-world use, like if knowing HashMap implementation details was the main requirement. It felt like they lacked practical skills. Also, it’s hard to get into the Toronto job market if you’re not part of a certain community.

The interview focused on my project using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. We went deep into its details, and they asked some technical questions. One interviewer pointed out an edge case I missed, and I explained I could figure out a solution. Then we talked about Java basics, like NullPointerException. I mentioned my Java experience was mostly with OOP, arrays, and strings, and I'd use try-catch for NullPointerException, showing a simple code example. A lot of the talk was about my project, though.