Applied online.

Received a phone call from a recruiter with super basic questions about my work eligibility status and why I wanted a new job.

Completed a code round online (2 HackerRank questions).

Went to an onsite interview, which they call a "power day" (4 interviews, 45 minutes each).

They followed up 2 days later with a result.

Q1: Bunch of standard behavioral questions. Talk about a time when... questions.

Q2: Case question: Capital One acquired an online bank, IGN. What are the business/tech benefits of this acquisition? What are the challenges?

They asked me to walk through a snippet of code and determine what it was doing. It was a function to determine "eligibility" for an offer to customers. Three variables fed into a function with a bunch of cascading if/else statements; some were redundant. You needed to make a truth table to figure it out. Then, analyze the output of the truth table and refactor the code into a few lines.

Q3/Q4: Technical background questions. They asked me mostly about my background and the things on my resume.

Then they quizzed me on questions like: What would you do if you had this table and wanted to get the second-highest value in this column? How would you write the query? You have data in an S3 file; how do you update some of the values in S3 efficiently? How do you deal with Spark driver-worker memory? What is a DAG in Spark? What's the difference between GroupByKey and ReduceByKey?

My interviewer said she tried to be a data scientist but found it "too hard." She then asked me DS algorithm questions, which I answered with a level of detail she probably didn't have the knowledge for, and she seemed impressed. She asked me about gradient boosting, how to tune an algorithm, and what my favorite algorithm was. She asked me about SQL window functions if I had ever used one.

I was pretty surprised I didn't get an offer because I answered almost all questions with good technical knowledge. However, if you go on Reddit and search for Capital One, you'll find out they are a "fake" tech company and have rejected plenty of candidates who got offers from real tech companies. They are looking for people who will drink the Kool-Aid.

I asked my interviewer where they were in terms of automated deployments, and he said they have a good portion of manual deployment and people doing SQL updates/inserts as a process. That sounds like a "real" tech company to me!