← Bank of America Interview Insights
The CSV-to-FTP pipeline part felt almost too simple to talk about for long, but there's actually a decent amount hiding in there around scheduling, failure handling, and idempotency.
Start by clarifying requirements and constraints, then outline a high-level architecture covering ingestion, processing, storage, and export. Dive into key components like idempotency, scheduling, file formatting, and secure FTP transfer, while discussing trade-offs and failure handling.
Pro tip: Emphasize reliability and reconciliation: banks care deeply about not losing or duplicating transactions. Mention how you'd handle partial failures, retries, and audit trails to demonstrate production maturity.
Ask about volume, latency, file size limits, security requirements, and the payment network's FTP specifications. Confirm whether ingestion is real-time or batch, and what 'finalized' means.
Propose a durable ingestion pipeline (e.g., message queue or API) that validates and stores transactions in a database with status tracking. Ensure idempotency to handle duplicates.
Design a scheduled job that queries finalized transactions, generates CSV files with proper formatting, and handles large datasets via chunking or streaming. Use a scheduler like cron or a workflow orchestrator.
Use SFTP/FTPS with key-based auth, and implement retries with exponential backoff. Log transfer status and alert on failures. Consider checksums to verify file integrity.
Discuss trade-offs between batch size and frequency, synchronous vs asynchronous processing, and how to handle reconciliation, monitoring, and audit requirements.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.