u/lordpr1mus

I need some help in practicing some of the interviews. I have an upcoming on site interview at Capital One for the lead senior software engineer.

Even though I have a lot of notes from the recruiter, I don't know how to prepare for a coding and a case study interview. Can someone please share their experiences?

I feel I badly need guidance on these 2 interviews. The reason is that,

1. Whenever I've given any technical assessments which are non leetcode style, they've gone bad because I don't know how to practice. Like leetcode, if I could practice on a small codebases where I would have to extend it and probably work on a small feature or find bugs, it would be great. Most of the time, the only thing I needed is time.

2. I've never given a case study interview. It would be great to get some examples and answers so that I can learn and practice.

They have mentioned 4 rounds

1. Coding

- Leetcode style? - NO

- It would be more focused on building API, security, database schema, scalability

- They would ask 3 level based questions

• Solve all of questions
• For Design and Style, the interviewer will check if the solution is easily understandable by an engineer
• For a Function or a class in the solution, the interviewer'll check if the problem at hand is solved or not.
• For Technical communication, the interviewer'll check how the candidate is communicating.
• Need to ask clarifying questions and thats how capital one gauges your abilities
• Need to produce optimized, scalable and resilient solution
• The solution needs to be modular, extensible, and demonstrating modern tooling and best practices. Also, need to use the coding language that is best for 2026

2. System Design

- Primary focus will be on architecture. Probably banking related or credit card related system design question

- The interviewer will be focussed on 3 areas

• Designing style
• Technical concepts
• Technical communication

- No need to have any banking experience.

- Need to

• Ask Clarifying questions
• Gather
  • Technical Requirements
  • Non-technical Requirements

- The solution needs to be thorough and have deep dives about a few things atleast

- Need to make sure about (Not limited to)

• Resiliency
• Scalability
• Reliability
• Authentication
• Security

- For authentication, authorization, the interviewer might talk about API operations

- The solution also needs to address failures

3. Behavioral

- The interviewer can be anyone. Not necessarily a person from the technical background (any line of business from capital one)

- This kind of interview will be a standard behavioral interview

- Need to make sure able to answer in STAR method and break down systematically

- They'll focus on 2 main areas

- Overall communication

- Questions might be asked related to the Capital One values

• Handling conflicts --> Need to make sure that conflicts internal/external
• Learning continuously --> The candidate needs to be the initiator in the story. For example, the candidate found and issue or a problem on their own and fixed it.
• Delivered results --> Make sure to quantify results, how you got the job done (very important)
• Influence (Huge important) --> As a senior lead, something you did which was positively impactful or you've influenced and how you swayed people positively
• Team collaboration --> Ability to cross-team (functional) collaboration
• Embracing change --> How you went with the change happened around you. Capital one like to talk about failure --> Make sure that you don't end on failure (regular STAR method) --> Talk about
  • What went wrong,
  • What you learnt since then,
  • The change(s) that you made,
  • The success you've seen since then.

4. Case Study

- It will be graded in 3 areas

• Quantitative Analysis
• Technical Problem Solving
• Technical Communication

- There will be a coding element, but not going to be a coding from scratch

• Ability to review and optimize existing code
• Going to get real world business scenario. It could be anything --> any business problem
• Need to solve a simple mathematical using code signal

- Going to have a back story to the business problem

- The interviewer will continue to feed the candidate information

- Implement solutions out of the box, make callouts,

- Goal is to provide solution and in the end explain what your finding is and provide recommendation

• Think out of the box --> Provide diff processes while working through the problem

- Hint: Watch a youtube video - Ace your capital ones case interview -- > Business analyst case.

I have 9+ years of experience at a big software company. But, until now, I didn't work at a senior level. I didn't have to make senior level decisions. I didn't have to design anything since the product I worked on was using all the old tools and technologies. It was built on a monolith architecture (no microservices). The product hardly used caching, nosql db, no message queue etc. I didn't have to get out of my comfort zone. I didn't have to worry about db performance, scaling out the app, logging, analytics etc. Until now, I didn't even have to think about scale of the system. Everything was already built in.

I am prepared to start at mid-level, learn everything and get experience and climb the ladder. But, everywhere my application is rejected for the mid-level roles sine I have too much experience (according to the recruiters and other people who reject my application). When I am selected for any interviews, its only senior role. Now, in the hiring manager interview round, they expect me to have worked on a project on a senior level. Their expectations are that I should've done more. But, the fact is that I haven't.

What should I do now?

I think I am at a point where I understand what my mistakes are for the past 9 years, but I can't go back and revert everything. But, I need a job since I don't have one in order to fix. I really need some guidance especially on my resume since the hiring managers and recruiters who take my interviews get to know that I haven't done any work at depth and they reject me.

This is not only about resume. This post is about guidance in general for interviews.

I’ve read on Blind and also heard from a non-IC Oracle employee that laid-off employees from 2025 and 2026 are unofficially prohibited from being re-hired for the next six months after their layoff period. Is this information accurate?

I’m asking this because I was referred by a highly senior Oracle employee (M5 level). The positions I was referred to were somewhat aligned with my profile, but I haven’t received any offers in the past two months.

I am currently interviewing at Salesforce for an SMTS full-stack role. I have a 60 minutes interview for Front-end. The help document sent by the recruiter mentions this

>Candidates will demonstrate their front-end development expertise, including best practices and effective application in solutions. They will be assessed on efficient coding (language/design), problem anticipation, and clear articulation of their technology-agnostic problem-solving process.

When I talked to the recruiter, she mentioned that the interviewer might ask about Vanilla Javascript, HTML, CSS questions. The recruiter also said that most probably they might not ask related to any frameworks, but I think they might ask something from react. The recruiter told that they might ask a couple of hands on things. They use codepair through hackerrank. The recruiter also said that the role vary depending on the requirements, meaning it can be 80-20 backend-frontend or can be 50-50 as well. This is a general SMTS role and team is not decided yet.

BTW, the interviewer is a front-end developer (LMTS). Can anyone guide me on what do I need to prepare? I have never given a front-end interview.

I am currently interviewing at Salesforce for an SMTS full-stack role. I have a 60 minutes interview for Front-end. The help document sent by the recruiter mentions this

>Candidates will demonstrate their front-end development expertise, including best practices and effective application in solutions. They will be assessed on efficient coding (language/design), problem anticipation, and clear articulation of their technology-agnostic problem-solving process.

When I talked to the recruiter, she mentioned that the interviewer might ask about Vanilla Javascript, HTML, CSS questions. The recruiter also said that most probably they might not ask related to any frameworks, but I think they might ask something from react. The recruiter told that they might ask a couple of hands on things. They use codepair through hackerrank. The recruiter also said that the role vary depending on the requirements, meaning it can be 80-20 backend-frontend or can be 50-50 as well. This is a general SMTS role and team is not decided yet.

BTW, the interviewer is a front-end developer (LMTS). Can anyone guide me on what do I need to prepare? I have never given a front-end interview.

I have a couple of interviews lined up and I think I’m not doing good in resume screening hiring manger interviews. Where can I give mock interviews for resume screening? I just want some human to check my stories and get feedback.