I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Capital One (San Francisco, CA) in Sep 2023
Interview
Recruiter phone screen. Technical assessment on CodeSignal requires you to share your screen, microphone, and camera, verifies you pass the recording requirements and is pretty invasive. The assessment is 4 Leetcode medium questions for 70 minutes. The recruiter told me no one ever finishes the CodeSignal and the pass no pass doesn't have a pattern so is pretty arbitrary. I think you have to get at least 3 questions completely right. There are 10 visible and 10 hidden tests for each question, so you don't know which hidden tests you got wrong. I knew the second that CodeSignal was used with all these extra requirements that it would be a negative corporate environment or engineering culture or even worse.
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.
Recruiter screening to begin with. Then, technical discussion about java, spring boot, design pattern, small coding tasks and followed by design assessment for distributed systems. Finally, managerial round for the team fit