I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Fidelity Investments (Raleigh, NC) in Jul 2023
Interview
First Round: HR screening No particular questions, informal and just Q&A plus the basics like asking how much I was expecting salary wise Went over the interview process 2nd Round: Introduction to team (mostly behavioral) 20-25 minutes interview with 2 Fidelity Employees 3rd Round: Technical Questions 1 hour interview with 3-4 fidelity employees Yes and no Questions about my experiences and technical understanding mostly Recommend to answer with: Yes and… No but… No coding challenges 4th Round: Technical (Coding and some questions) This one took me by surprised as in the beginning it was mention it would be only one round of technical but in this round we did some coding challenges and some technical questions. Prepare to have an IDE ready to code and run the program they want you to code that was one my mistakes. Since I was given no guidance on what was to come on the interview I did not have this handy, I expected they would provide the platform and I would code there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1st Round: HR screening Questions: Expected compensation 2nd Round Questions: - Walk us through your resume - What experience have you had with Spring/building an API? - What are some of the tools you use to debug API endpoints? - Why are you interested in Fidelity? 3rd Round: Technical Questions - what is object oriented programming (4 pillars of OOP)? - What are the access modifiers in java (e.g., private, protected, public)? - How do you use class A in class B (How do you invoke class A in class b)? - Can you explain what is a hashmap? - How do you handle exceptions in JAVA? (Exception handling, basically “try” and “catch”) - What is a REST API? - How do you test a REST API? (I said I used the tool insomnia) - What motivates you to work everyday? - I would study general terms in spring as they asked me if I have ever developer an API. Which I mentioned I hadn’t but I know the basics principal. - Asked me if I know about Agile and SCRUM - They asked me if I knew about SQL (general) Probably I missed a few but these are the questions I remember. After the questions they ask you you can ask questions for around 10 to 15 minutes at the end. 4th Round: Technical (Coding and some questions) There were 2 coding challenges: - First one was to use java stream to iterate through a list and find the even numbers. - The second one was to take a string and find all the unique characters and its count They asked me what were the constrains un PUT versus POST,
HR was the first round
Followed by HM
HR asked for availability and resume then just disappeared
Even after following up, no response
Then next week for the same role, same message she sent to a friend of mine
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked for availability and then totally ghosted me
1. DSA Round (Easy Level)
They usually don’t go very deep into complex algorithms. Expect fundamentals like:
Anagram check (e.g., compare two strings efficiently)
Palindrome check (string or number)
Basic array/string manipulation
Sometimes simple hashing or sorting logic
2. DBMS Basics
What is a primary key / foreign key
Difference between SQL joins (INNER, LEFT, RIGHT)
Basics of normalization
Simple query writing
They usually keep it conceptual + a few practical questions.
3. OOPs Concepts
Very standard questions, such as:
Pillars of OOP: Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction
Real-life examples
Difference between overloading vs overriding
Why OOP is useful
They may ask you to relate this to your project.
4. Puzzle / Logical Thinking
These are not super hard—just to test reasoning:
Basic math/logical puzzles
Pattern-based questions
Situational problem solving
5. Project Discussion
Explain your project clearly:
Problem statement
Your role
Tech stack
Be ready for:
“Why did you choose this approach?”
“What challenges did you face?”
“How would you improve it?”
I interviewed at Fidelity Investments (Durham, NC)
Interview
Behavioral interview with the hiring manager centered around STAR-style questions and getting an understanding of your current position. Focused on finding overlap in your experience with the experience needed for the role