ACI Worldwide – Interview Experience (On-Campus)

📍 On-Campus | Pune - Kalyani Nagar | SDE Intern → PPO Opportunity
🗓 Drive Duration: 29th October – 2nd November
💼 Process: Online Assessment → Technical Interview → Technical + Managerial → HR

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🏢 Company Overview

ACI Worldwide is a global leader in real-time digital payment software, powering payment solutions for banks, financial institutions, merchants, and billers in over 80+ countries.

They specialize in:

• Real-time digital payments
• Fraud management
• Secure payment processing
• High-performance transaction systems

This drive was conducted for Software Engineer hiring through campus placements.

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📋 Basic Details

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1️⃣ Online Assessment

• 50 MCQs
• Duration: 1 hour
• Topics included:
  • Java basics
  • OOP concepts
  • Output guessing (Java Codes)
  • OS
  • DBMS
  • Aptitude

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2️⃣ Technical Interview

📅 Held on 31 November
⏱ Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes

The interviewer was a Project Lead with significant experience — detail-oriented, and technically deep.

🔹 BE Project Discussion (Very detailed)

Questions included:

• Explain your project in depth
• Team size and task distribution
• Draw the architecture diagram
• Why you choose to work on frontend + web scraping?
• How does web scraping work? (deep dive)
• Why this tech stack?
• What is completed and how did you implement it?
• Discussion on WebSockets (my previous answer includes WebSockets)

🔹 Internship Discussions

• Draw architecture diagram (Internship 1)
• Draw sequence diagram (Internship 2)
• Challenges faced & solutions
• 20–25 mins of deep implementation questions

🔹 Achievements Discussions

• DSA & CP achievements
• Mastercard Hackathon experience from start to win

She appreciated the breadth of my achievements.

🔹 DSA Questions (Asked directly to write optimal code)

1. Peak element in an array https://leetcode.com/problems/find-peak-element/description/
2. Recursive sum of digits of a number (if digit 0 is found → multiply number by 2)
   for eg. if number is 1203 will start from right to left will remove 3 first then 0 appears so we multiple remaining number i.e. 12 by 2 so it becomes 24 and then remove 4 and then 2 final answer should be 9

Later she asked me where I used various data structures in my projects — covering almost all DS types.

🔹 Java Knowledge

I explained that:

• I know the basics but
• Being strong in C++ and Dart (OOP), I can learn Java quickly

She appreciated the honesty + confidence.

🔹 OOP Questions

• Pillars of OOP (explained using a Phone example)
• Access Modifiers (public, private, protected)
• Interfaces vs Abstract Classes
• Copy Constructor & Move Constructor
• Shallow Copy vs Deep Copy
• Function Overloading vs Overriding
• Diamond Problem (and how C++ solves it with virtual inheritance)

🔹 DBMS Questions

• Types of Keys (Primary, Alternate, Candidate, Super)
• Apply keys on a table from my project
• Anomalies (Update, delete and insert)
• Normalization vs Denormalization
• Why denormalization?
• Types of joins + 5–6 real scenarios
• Views + syntax
• Procedure vs Trigger
• SQL: 3rd largest salary

🔹 Exception Handling

• Concepts & uses
• Exception Handeling used in project
• Some Java-based exception handling questions (I clearly mentioned that I don't have much knowledge of exception handling in Java, but I will definitely read about it afterwards.)

🔹 Final Feedback

She said:

“Probably the longest interview I’ve taken. You explained extremely well — good clarity and communication.”

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🧩 3️⃣ Technical + Managerial Interview

⏱ Duration: 40 minutes
This round started exactly 10 minutes after the first interview

The interviewer was a Senior Manager with 22 years of experience.
He began by saying:

“I heard very good things about you from the previous interviewer.”

Discussion Topics

• Introduction
• Internship experiences & responsibilities
• Challenges faced (10-minute discussion)
• Explain any project
• How to deploy an app on the Play Store
• Teamwork scenario:
  “If two teammates leave and issues remain unresolved, what will you do?”
• DSA: Trapping Rain Water https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/ asked me to directly write the optimized code I wrote the code using prefix and suffix sum
• CP Lead role at PASC — 10-minute discussion
• Java knowledge

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4️⃣ HR Interview

⏱ Duration: 45 minutes
This round started exactly 10 minutes after the first interview This round focused on:

• Introduction (non-technical)
• Parents’ occupations
• Leadership experience
• CP Lead responsibilities (long discussion)
• Internship challenges
• Strengths & weaknesses (non-generic answers expected)
• Why should we hire you?
• Higher studies discussion
• How will you contribute to ACI?
  She was observing every minute thing very clearly like body language, speaking speed, communication clarity
  She gave multiple suggestions during the conversation

Final Questions

• Any questions from my side?

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Final Result

After 2 days, the final selected candidates were announced.
My name was on the list.

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Additional Notes

Interview experiences varied among students:

• Some had Technical+Managerial before Technical
• Some interviews lasted only 20–25 minutes
• Question styles are interviewer-dependent

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💡 Suggestions for Future Candidates

1. Stay confident and composed
2. Include co-curricular activities (ACI gives weightage to them)
3. Keep communication clear and structured
4. Use pen & paper to explain logic
5. Strengthen core concepts before learning new ones
6. Give mock interviews with seniors

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If you have any doubts or want guidance, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/aniketdeore/)

All the best to everyone preparing! 🚀