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.
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.