First Citizens Bank Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I got referred to FCB and a recruiter reached out. They told me there would be three rounds initially. The first was with a tech lead focusing on my background, which was easy to talk about. He then gave me a code snippet to debug, which I found trickier than he did, and I think I messed it up, but they still put me in for round two. Round two was with a Senior Software Engineer who asked some system design questions. This interviewer seemed to really not know how to run an interview; their questions were super vague and confusing, and I got tired of trying to answer because they kept cutting me off. It wasn't great. Surprisingly, I got moved to a third round with a director. The recruiter said it would be behavioral, but the director ended up asking about my background again. This interviewer was also unfocused, easily distracted, and seemed to gloss over my answers while repeating questions. Out of nowhere, they declared I couldn't code, which was bizarre since I hadn't written any code for them. The recruiter then called, admitting the director went off-script and that they wanted to see me code. I agreed, and they set up a 4th round with the same person from the second round. They asked two coding questions, and I solved both in my textpad. This interviewer was a bit better this time, and I felt I did my best in this round. After that, the recruiter ghosted me despite my follow-ups. It was a really unprofessional experience overall.

The interviewer asked about my project experience. I was asked one technical question that was like a word problem. No Leetcode or algorithm questions. It was short, no longer than 30 minutes.

So there were 3 stages to this interview. First was a short 15 min call with the recruiter. Then, I had a 30 min video chat with the hiring manager. Lastly, there was a final 1 hr video panel interview.