Mastercard Software Engineer interview experience

I went into a Karat-style round where the interviewer was fast-paced and, honestly, not very organized. We spent a noticeable chunk of time on a system design prompt about an EV charging context—finding the nearest station and dealing with payments—but the conversation didn’t really flow into actual architecture trade-offs. They seemed more focused on checking generic components than understanding choices, and that made it hard to show reasoning.

The DSA part was equally time-constrained. I was pushed toward writing something that “just works” rather than an optimized approach, and I tried