J'ai postulé en ligne. J'ai passé un entretien chez Capital One (Plano, TX)
Entretien
Applied online. Got a phone call from a recruiter with super basic questions about my work eligibility status, why I want a new job. Did a code round online (2 hacker rank questions) then went to onsite interview they call a power day (4 interviews 45 min each) and then they followed up 2 days later with a result.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
Q1: Bunch of standard behavioral questions. Talk about a time when... questions.
Q2: Case question: Capital One acquired an online bank IGN. What are the business/tech benefits of this acquisition? What are the challenges? They asked me to walk through a snippet of code and determine what it was doing. It was a function to determine "eligibility" for an offer to customers. 3 Variables into a function that had a bunch of cascading if/else statements - some were redundant. You need to make a truth table to figure it out. Then analyze the output of the truth table and refactor the code into a few lines.
Q3/Q4: Technical background questions. They asked me mostly about my background and the things on my resume. Then quizzed me on questions like - what would you do if you had this table and wanted to get the second-highest value in this column how would you write the query? You have data in s3 file how do you update some of the values in s3 efficiently? How do you deal with spark driver-worker memory? What is a DAG in spark? Difference between GroupByKey and ReduceByKey? My interviewer said she tried to be a data scientist but it was "too hard" and then asked me DS algorithm questions which I answered to a level of detail she probably didn't have the knowledge on and she seemed impressed. She asked me about gradient boosting, how to tune an algorithm, what my favorite algorithm was. Asked me about SQL window function if I ever used one.
I was pretty surprised I didn't get an offer because I answered almost all questions with good level of technical knowledge but if you go on Reddit and search for the capital one you'll find out they are a "fake" tech company and they've rejected plenty of candidates that got offers from real tech companies. They are looking for people who will drink the cool-aid. I asked my interviewer where they are in terms of automated deployments and he said they have a good portion of manual deployment and people doing SQL updates/inserts as a process. That sounds like a "real" tech company to me!
J'ai passé un entretien chez Capital One (McLean, VA)
Entretien
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.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
Design a rate limiter using a token bucket algorithm and discuss how it would handle bursty traffic and distributed deployments.