A recruiter contacted me from LinkedIn. We spoke on the phone, and the first question asked was if I needed visa sponsorship.

I am a citizen and do not require sponsorship.

She then asked for my CV and mentioned that their director was very interested in my background. She shared a few names from the leadership team and scheduled an interview with the director.

Instead of the director, an engineer called me. He had started working there in the last 5-6 months. The discussion mostly focused on my current role, and he asked a few technical questions, primarily related to data engineering. I provided several solutions; nothing was particularly difficult.

After that, they invited me to their McLean office for four interviews.

One of them was with a recent PhD graduate. He presented a document classification problem related to fraud, then expanded it to multi-label classification. I offered potential solutions and asked meaningful questions, and it went smoothly.

The second interview was with another machine learning engineer, who brought another data engineer with him. He asked a question about my CV without fully understanding it. He had no background in deep learning and inquired about the attention mechanism, referencing the wrong project. He was not a very good communicator.

The second interviewer then posed a coding question. It was a LeetCode medium-hard problem related to word frequencies in a document and sorting. He was a nice guy with good communication skills. I solved the question without any difficulty, and they didn't even comment when I completed the code.

The third interview was behavioral. One interviewer typed behind his laptop whatever I said or understood. The questions were STAR format, "Tell me about a time," etc.

The last interview was with someone whose relevance I didn't understand. The interview went smoothly, and I answered his questions without difficulty. They called it a case interview, and it was about encryption. He showed some shell/bash commands that called a script to perform encryption. He asked several questions related to it and wanted me to write a script in any language. This person was an IT guy.

I believe he asks the same question to everyone, but "one size does not fit all." He should learn that. Overall, he was a nice guy, but the questions were not relevant.

Overall, everything went well.

Two days after the onsite interviews, the recruiter informed me that they would not be moving forward with my background. I checked the credentials of the machine learning director and two machine learning interviewers. I have a significantly more compelling background, credentials, and experience. It didn't make sense to me.

I believe there are two potential reasons:

1. The engineers and director are not A-players.
2. They want to apply for a green card for someone on their team and need to create arguments for it, such as being unable to find a local candidate.

Overall, Capital One was a waste of time. I used one day of PTO and drove to Virginia. I believe the CEO has a good vision, but the C4ML guys are not very promising. I didn't see any hardcore machine learners or algorithmic guys on their team. HR is very well organized and tries to be nice to candidates.

Sorting based on frequency of words

Document classification Case interview Behavioral