I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Capital One in Mar 2024
Interview
It's a long 4 hours "power" interview as they call it. It has architectural part, coding part, some kind of "business question" part (where a software engineer could be asked mostly irrelevant mind boggling questions about calculating profit, making marketing suggestion etc) and behavioral part. I felt like I fell short on first 3 parts. I am not good at quickly-code-me-solution-while-i-watch type thing or "find the bug in 20 20-liners given 1 minute for each". Architectural interviews are always open ended meaning they are not about coming up with a good architectural solution but rather meeting your interviewer's version of truth. So you have to use your divination and interrogation skills to figure it from your interviewer. Needless to say I was exhausted from the tension and incessant 4 hour speaking. They throw you a 30 minutes bathroom break as a bonus, but it's not felt much like a break. This was my second attempt with CapitalOne and I don't think there will be the third one.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There were many questions. I vaguely remember one about a cost of software upgrade based on some periodicity: year vs 6 months. It had to be calculated.
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.