Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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16 stories

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Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

CodeSignal OA With Hidden Tests and a Painful ID Check

Fresh OA from an hour ago!! Background: I don't need sponsorship. A small side story: uploading my ID took forever this time. Maybe the lighting was bad, or because I was holding the ID right up against the camera, but it kept telling me it couldn't read the text. In the end it only verified after I screenshotted an old passport scan from a folder on my computer. Luckily I wasn't in a hurry... Ev…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2026

Power Day with Behavioral, Case Study and Agentic Coding

Sharing a recent Capital One TDP Power Day interview report. The Power Day had three rounds in total: Behavioral, Case Study, and Agentic Coding. The Behavioral round was pretty standard, basically all classic BQ. As long as you prepare a few projects ahead of time and tell the stories clearly with the STAR framework, you should be fine. Teamwork, conflict, and failure are especially worth prepar…

Onsite0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerSenior+
Reported Sep 2026

System Design With a Phone-Scrolling Interviewer, Then an Offer

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 tec…

OfferOnsite0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Power Day with Case, Behavioral, Coding and System Design

I just finished the C1 power day. There are already plenty of OA write-ups on the forum so I won't go into that, I'll mainly talk about the four power day rounds as a reference for anyone interviewing later. The four rounds were case, behavioral, coding, and system design. The case was the virtual card number one, which someone has posted about here before. First we talked about the benefits and…

In progressOnsite0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

Superday With a Case Study and an AI-Assisted Coding Round

The Superday was three parts, behavioral (standard), case study, and AI assisted coding. The case study covered the use of virtual credit cards and had multiple sub-parts. After weighing the tradeoffs of virtual cards, you analyze some virtual card numbers and see what specific conditions they fulfill and you debug some code regarding the conditionals for filtering these card numbers. The AI assi…

Onsite0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Four-Question OA Where the Rotting-Oranges BFS Ate My Time

Posting this a while after the fact. I strongly recommend doing them in the order 1-2-4-3. People on the forum did say 3 was kind of hard, and I got stuck on it for ages. I'd have been better off doing 4. To explain: the easy questions up front take roughly 25 minutes, and then two mediums in 45 minutes is still pretty hard. You're better off getting full points on one of the last two questions..…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Four Power Day Rounds and a Virtual Credit Card Case

I did the four-round Senior Lead AI Engineer Power Day in late September. It felt all right overall. I guess poor performance on the VNC case was why I didn't pass. Round 1 — AI Engineering / System Design Design an Enterprise Agent Platform The interviewer asked a series of AI / agent / platform / system-design questions that were within the scope of my preparation. Round 2 — Technical Case: Vir…

RejectedOnsite0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Four CodeSignal Tasks Without a Recruiter Call

The author reports receiving a four-question CodeSignal assessment from Capital One without prior recruiter contact. One task involved a basic array operation, but the author could not recall its details. The other tasks concerned alternating high and low values around a circular array, identifying a smaller pattern within a numeric matrix, and determining whether segments fit on a number line co…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Power Day Across Two Days

I had read the Capital One interview reports on the forum and found them very helpful, so I'm sharing some more details to give something back. It was still the four-round Capital One interview, the so-called Power Day, split into case, behavioral, coding, and system design. I spread the interviews over two days. Day one, case interview: The familiar virtual-card-number problem from the forum, wi…

Onsite1
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Four Coding Questions in the Online Assessment

Given an array, find the first element whose two adjacent neighbors are both strictly larger. Given 2 arrays with the same length n, calculate the sum of absolute diff for each cyclic t-shift of nums1 with nums2. Return a list of all sums sorted in nondescending order. Given a 2D matrix and a pattern, return the coordinate of the submatrix with the lowest row index and lowest column. The submatri…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Capital One Software Engineer interview: CodeSignal OA under time pressure

My process was dominated by a CodeSignal OA where time pressure mattered a great deal. I completed the assessment and earned full points on three of the four questions, which was a relief, but the clock was already working against me by the time I reached the last one. The OA had four DSA questions in 70 minutes. I fully solved questions 1, 2, and 4 and got top marks on each. When I reached quest…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Capital One Software Engineer interview: four one-hour interviews in one day

I interviewed in a standard four-interviews-in-one-day format. After earlier rounds, I had four one-hour sessions that were evaluated together: two technical interviews, one behavioral interview, and one case interview. The technical interviews used LeetCode-style problem solving. The behavioral session focused on my experience and how I described my work. The case interview was about walking thr…

0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerSenior+
Reported Apr 2026

System Design Prep With No Cloud Background

Heading into this loop I honestly wasn't sure I'd make it through. I figured I could be a borderline candidate at best, and part of me expected to flop outright. The reason was simple: I've never really worked hands-on with cloud. My general software engineering background carries over, but it isn't the same, and I feared that unfamiliar terminology would trip me up or that I'd come across like s…

OfferOther0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

A Full OA Question Bank (Oct 2025–Jan 2026)

Given a target and an array, count how many elements are greater than the target and how many are less than it. If there are more greater elements, return greater; if there are more smaller elements, return smaller; if they're equal, return tie. Given an initial state, a season, and a day, return the moon state for that specific date. The moon's cycle is 8 days with 8 possible states, and the ini…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

A Tetris-Style Grid Placement OA Question

There's an n x m grid of squares, and I need to draw a pattern on it. The pattern is made up of several fixed block shapes, kind of like Tetris. The problem gave 5 figure types: A, B, C, D, E. For A: in a 2x2 square, it only occupies the top-left, top-right, and bottom-left cells. So A is: That is, a U-shape / concave shape with the top-middle cell empty. This should go by the example matrix — fo…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four OA Problems Under a Tight Clock

The first problem was to figure out how many numbers in an array are a power of some number k. Basically you check whether repeatedly dividing by k eventually gets you to 1, but you have to watch out for the special case where k=1. The second problem was about a planet's lunar calendar: given the moon phase at the start of the year, compute the moon phase on a given date. The phases cycle every 8…

Online Assessment0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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