I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Capital One (Richmond, VA) in Aug 2017
Interview
TL;DR: Great people, nice campus, looks promising, but high-caliber engineers need not waste their time until the case interview is revised / eliminated.
There were three rounds of interviews. Each one was 45 minutes. The first was a generic technical one (leetcode easy - medium, much more on the easy side). I finished this in 15 minutes. The second was their case interview (more on this later). The third was a generic behavioral interview that was on the casual side so far as these go. Almost everyone I met was very friendly. They give you a tour of the campus before the interview.
The one downside of this interview was the case interview. I was interviewed by an older lady and mid-level software engineer. The older lady said that she was the head of the case interview department. They handed me a printed piece of paper with a fake bash shell and asked me some questions about how to build a system that handled data securely given this. The question was open-ended, but it seemed like the lady in particular had a set of items that she was trying to ensure that each candidate identified and solved. The mid-level software engineer barely made eye contact throughout the interview, seeming much more interested in his phone. I built a working solution to the problem (identical to that built by engineers who received offers), but the lady seemed dissatisfied with the way I had arrived at it. The parting interaction was as follows:
Lady: “So, do you have any more interviews today?”
Me: “One more”
[Lady smiles sadly at the engineer, who chuckles, and they both leave the room with that]
I interviewed at a big 5 tech company shortly afterwards and accepted an offer there. I was promoted within the first year with significant comp increase in addition to stock rewards / bonuses. Caution is advised to high-caliber engineers applying for positions at this company. It will likely turn out to be a waste of your time, particularly given the significantly higher comp packages at competitive tech / financial services companies.
Scheduled a call with recruiter. Recruiter didnt show up for the screening call and cancelled it 5 mins after the scheduled time. Dropped a follow up email and got no response. After a week, I got an email from the recruiter stating I am selected for the next round i.e Assessment. Sent me an email with the assessment description but no link. When I sent a follow up email asking for the link, I got ghosted again. It was a bad experience. Felt like she is toying with me. Why ghost an applicant repetitively? Unprofessional recruiter who doesn't respect an applicant's time or efforts!
4 rounds of interview including coding , design , case study, behavioral after clearing the code signal assesment. Coding was medium hard of 2 questions each. case study and system design was difficult.
This took a bit longer than expected, stretching over several weeks. The technical rounds were intense, featuring an LRU cache implementation and a problem on detecting duplicate transactions within a 60-second window. I was nervous at first, but it clicked for me when I realized I had practiced a similar approach on PracHub just days before. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive an offer in the end, but the experience was a solid learning opportunity. The behavioral questions felt straightforward, so I wish I had made a stronger impression in the technical segments.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Implement an LRU cache with get and put operating in O(1)