In 2026 expect prompts on a payment-processing system that transfers money reliably and never loses or double-sends it, a real-time fraud-detection pipeline that scores and flags transactions, and a restartable batch job that reconciles a day's transactions against clearing-house files. Interviewers reward idempotency, a state machine per transfer, reconciliation for every failure mode, and checkpointed restartable batch processing. Because the domain is money movement, hand-waving on failure handling does not survive; the interview rewards precise reasoning about exactly-once semantics and recovery.
About Barclays
Barclays India operates two large Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in Pune and Chennai, working on investment banking technology, retail banking platforms, and risk/compliance systems.
- Products
- Barclays iPortal (investment banking client portal) · BARX (electronic trading platform) · Barclays Bank UK digital banking · CARDS platform (global credit card processing) · Risk and compliance systems (Basel III / FRTB)
- Competitors
- JPMorgan Chase India GCC · Goldman Sachs Bengaluru · Deutsche Bank Chennai · HSBC India GCC · Citi India GCC
- Scale
- ~20,000 employees in India (across GCCs). UK-listed (BARC). India GCC headcount growing post-Brexit technology insourcing. Pune: IB tech. Chennai: retail banking tech.
Barclays recruitment process
01
Online coding and aptitude assessment
02
Technical coding round on DSA
03
System-design round on a payments or reconciliation service
04
Hiring-manager round, then offer
What to expect in each round
01
Round 1 (60-90 min)
online coding and aptitude assessment.
02
Round 2 (45-60 min)
coding round on data structures and algorithms.
03
Round 3 (45-60 min)
system-design round on payments, fraud, or reconciliation.
04
Round 4 (45 min)
behavioral and hiring-manager round.
System Design questions Barclays asked
Sourced from 2+ candidate post-mortems. Hit Practice to answer any one with AI voice feedback.
- 01
Hard
Design a system to predict same-day delivery feasibility for a new pincode in tier-3 India.
- 02
Hard
We're seeing UPI failure rates spike at 9pm on weekends. How would you debug, and what's your hypothesis?
- 03
Hard
Walk me through how you'd build idempotency into a payment retry system. What happens if the network drops mid-callback?
- 04
Hard
Design Swiggy Genie's matching algorithm. How does it differ from food-order matching?
- 05
Hard
Walk me through how you'd architect transaction-level fraud detection for 100M daily UPI transactions.
- 06
Medium
How would you build a recommendation engine that suggests bills the user is about to forget?
- 07
Medium
Design a cashback-allocation system that prevents abuse without alienating genuine users.
- 08
Hard
Design a system to detect duplicate documents at web scale. What's your approximation strategy?
- 09
Hard
Design Amazon Prime's recommendation engine. How would you handle the cold-start for a new Prime member?
- 10
Medium
Design a URL shortener like bit.ly. Walk me through database choice and scaling.
- 11
Hard
Design Instagram's news feed ranking. How do you handle a celebrity who posts 50 times an hour?
- 12
Hard
Design Amazon's order tracking notification system. Optimise for cost at 100M orders/day.