Capital One has perfected the art of interviewing to bring forth the best in their candidates. I have interviewed with several companies, and each company prides itself on its interviewing skills, claiming their questions weed out the chaff from the wheat to choose the brightest and the best. In reality, however, I feel that very few companies are capable of asking the right questions to identify a candidate's qualifications – both laterally (depth of knowledge in a specific tool, such as optimization techniques) and vertically (exposure to various cloud technologies). Capital One is one such company.

At Capital One, there is an initial phone interview with a technical recruiter. If the background fits the role, the application progresses to stage two, comprising a light technical round with an engineer from a similar background. If you pass this stage, you will be directed to an in-person "power day" session that lasts for four hours.

While it may seem intimidating at first, the process was enjoyable. There is a total of four interviews:

• Two job-fit interviews that determine your technical qualifications, so expect many technical questions related to your job.
• A behavioral interview, which is notably conducted by a software engineer, not HR. Be prepared to respond to questions using the "STAR" (Situation, Task, Action, Result) format.
• A case interview. Despite comments from others about its difficulty, I found it to be easy. It is intended to determine your instant problem-solving capabilities given a situation, and you are expected to think outside the box to solve a business problem. Understand the situation well, and ask many questions if you don't. Consider the advantages and disadvantages of the situation, the risks involved, and how to mitigate them. Take a few moments to think about the scenario and how you would react before responding.

During the case interview, there is also a code review session where I was tasked to untangle and break up complex logic into simpler parts, then convert it into code that is maintainable and easy to decipher/understand.

Overall, hats off to Capital One for drawing out the best from their interview candidates by asking all the right questions. The interviewers were interactive and encouraging throughout the process; the four hours seemed to pass by in an instant!

This was followed by a chat with the hiring manager before an offer was made.

Capital One will keep you constantly updated and will also share pertinent materials to prepare for interviews. My advice is to go with an open mind and use your sound judgment to crack the case interview. You will never be able to guess what scenario will be asked in the real interview beforehand.

Data-related questions AWS stack Spark Hive Data types Example of a difficult project and how you handled it