After three months of interviewing, I finally landed a Lead Software Engineer job at Capital One. A bit of background: I've been the lead engineer at a fairly small company for close to ten years, and almost everything I know came from doing the work. I had barely touched LeetCode-style problems, and my system design knowledge came only from the systems I'd built at my job. To get through the technical rounds I leaned on an online system design course and a YouTube channel that walks through LeetCode solutions.
On the search itself, you need an actual plan for where you apply. In the beginning I sent my resume to every opening that caught my eye and gave it no more thought, and hardly anyone answered. I was convinced I could do well at those companies, but the calls never came. So I switched approaches: I skipped LinkedIn and Indeed, looked up companies myself, and applied on their own career sites. I also tailored my resume to the job description, highlighting the experience that fit it. Much of the screening is automated by AI these days, so even for roles you're obviously qualified for, silence is common. The best advice I have is don't get discouraged, trust yourself, and keep going, because the right fit does show up. Targeting specific companies with a tailored resume brought in more recruiter calls, and those became more interviews.
Through all of it I knew exactly two things needed work: LeetCode-style questions and system design. I hadn't been through a technical interview loop in years, so I felt way behind on algorithms. Capital One sent me an online assessment with a two-week deadline. I'd already been grinding the YouTube channel's problems for a few weeks, but for the last two weeks I pushed myself to study 5+ hours a day. To guess what Capital One usually asks, I combed through GitHub, Reddit, Glassdoor and anything else I could find. The recurring topics were matrices, arrays, hash maps, and the lamp problem about finding the brightest position along a street. That showed me where to put most of my effort. I skimmed DFS and BFS only briefly, and thankfully neither came up. Spaced repetition suited me: 20 minutes per problem, and if it wasn't solved by then I watched the video solution and tried again the following day.
After I passed the assessment, I was invited to a Powerday made up of four interviews: a behavioral round, system design, another technical round, and a case study. Capital One shares some prep material that gives a sense of what to focus on. What I'd suggest is working the Online Banking System problem on LeetCode and putting real effort into system design and behavioral prep. For me, the case study and the second technical round weren't LeetCode-type questions. They were about practical coding, debugging, and reading through code to follow what it does. The behavioral questions were STAR-style, and having a structured answer framework ready made that round far easier than it would have been otherwise.
System design was honestly my worst interview of the four, even though I'd prepared for it more than anything else. I was confident I could design what they asked for, but the interviewer looked disengaged and had his eyes on his phone the entire time. That threw me off, and it mostly felt like talking to myself. Every so often he'd look up and fire off an oddly random question about the design. My main tip is to stick to whatever framework you practiced and build the simplest working design you can, since there's room to extend it later. At one point he asked about security and I had nothing good to say, and I truly believed I'd failed right there. I admitted that I didn't know, and he moved on. I felt the other three interviews went very well, which I hoped would balance it out.
Be confident and put in as much study time as you can, because the result tracks the effort. Best of luck to everyone!
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