I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Capital One (McLean, VA) in Oct 2017
Interview
A recruiter contacted with me from Linkedin. We talked on the phone the first question asked was if I need visa sponsorship or not. I am a citizen, not need sponsorship. She asked for my CV. She said their director is very interested in my background. She shared few names from leadership team and scheduled an interview with the director. Instead of the director, an engineer called me who started to work there in last 5-6 months. Mostly discussion about my current role and he asked few technical questions mostly related to data engineering. I provided several solutions. Nothing hard. Then they invited me to their McLean office.
Four interviews there. One of them was with recent phd grad. He asked document classification problem related to fraud. Then he made it multi-label classification etc.. I give potential solutions and asked meaningful questions. It went smooth.
The second interview was with another machine learning engineer. However, he came with another data engineer to the interview. He asked a question from my cv without knowing what it is. He has no background in deep learning. He asked about attention mechanism by referring to the wrong project. He was not a very good communicator. Then the second interviewer asked a coding question. It was medium hard in leetcode related to frequencies of words in a document and sorting. He was a nice guy with good communication skills. I solved the question without any difficulty and they did not even feel like making any comment when I complete the code.
The third interview was behavioral, one guy writes behind laptop whatever you say or whatever he understands. The questions are star question, tell me about a time etc..
The last interview was with a person who I do not understand why I talk with. The interview actually went smooth and I answered his questions, nothing difficult. They call it case interview. It was about encryption. He shows some shell/bash command which calls a script to do encryption. He asks several question related to it and he wanted me to write a script in any language. This guy was a IT guy. I think he is asking same question to everyone. However one size does not fit all. He should learn that.. Overall he was a nice guy but questions were just not relevant.
Overall everything went well.
Two days after onsite, the recruiter told that they will not move forward with my background. I check the credentials of machine learning director and two machine learning interviewers. I have a significantly more compelling background, credentials, and experience. It did not make any sense to me. I believe there are two potential reasons, one of them is the engineers and director is not a a-player, or second potential reason is they want to apply a green card for a person in their team, they need to create arguments for it. We could not find local candidate etc.. Overall capital one was a waste of time. I waste my one day PTO for them and drive to Virginia. I believe CEO has good vision but C4ML guys are not very promising. I did not see any hardcore machine learners or algorithmic guys in their team. HR is very well organized and they try to be nice to candidates.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Sorting based on frequency of words
Document classification
Case interview
Behavioral