I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Capital One in Oct 2021
Interview
Recruiter reached out to me to have a chat about whether I'd be interested in applying for a role at Capital One. After that is where the bulk of the interview process was:
1. online coding assessment with 4 problems and a 70 minute time limit - completing all is not required, you just need to get some minimum passing score and quality consistent code. Once you pass, you'll move onto scheduling the "Power Day."
2. Power Day Part 1: Algorithm Technical - count the number of primes (same as leetcode)
3. Power Day Part 2: System Design - design a smart meter system for an apartment complex
4. Power Day Part 3: Behavioral - 3 questions... tell me about a time when priorities changed and how you handled it, you successfully overcame a blocker and completed the task on time, and you had to work with someone difficult on your team and how to made it workable.
5. Power Day Part 4 - Technical Case - talked about pros and cons of capital one investing in a virtual chat system powered by machine learning (ML), what kind of data would be useful to feed that ML model, walked through some code that creates a lost of most recent event from a table, and how you would handle updating the code to support reading a different amount of events based on the object
I was rejected a few days after the power day via an email that just read "Thank you for your interest... [but] we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates at this time." No real feedback from a recruiter about how the process went. It would be nice to show empathy and reject someone with a personal email from the recruiter and give feedback on how it all went from the other perspective.
Interview questions [6]
Question 1
count the number of primes up to and including N
(204 on leetcode)
design a smart meter system that measures the electricity usage and reports the measurement every minute to a central service. tents and building managers should be able to view this data on a website while being able to view it by hour, day, week, month, and any interval in the past.
What are some pros and cons of capital one investing in a virtual chat bot and what kind of data would be useful to feed the machine learning model for it?
Interviewed for an engineer position, the interview was a joke. Asked basic OOP question with a few follow ups - no system design portion. Interviewer was very laid back and chill, didn't take it to seriously.
Was not too difficult. three total interviews all on the same day back to back. technical one, behavioral one and a case which was more of just a debugging question
Expecting a challenging experience, I found the interview at Capital One to be intense, particularly during the system design section. The question on designing a rate limiter with a token bucket algorithm took me by surprise; mid-way through the problem, I realized it was very similar to a drill I’d practiced on prachub.com just days earlier. The technical rounds included several DSA questions, and the interviewers were thorough but supportive. Ultimately, I received an offer and happily accepted, feeling well-prepared despite the pressure.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a rate limiter using a token bucket algorithm and discuss how it would handle bursty traffic and distributed deployments.