Fidelity

Status: FTE, Senior SWE, 20+ yoe Position: Director, Quant Development (Java) Applied on Fidelity Careers site # Round 0: Phone screen with Recruiter ### Questions: * Describe experience with Risk Systems * What container technologies have worked with * Expected to work on site 5 days a week every other week * Compensation: base 185k, there is a bonus target 35%, expect to be met 90% (NOTE: base range listed on Job Description was 126-255k) ### Explained Interview process: * 2 Zoom interviews 45 minute each * 1 Zoom interview with a Hiring Manager (SPOILER: I didn't get to the Hiring Manager) Interview confirmation stated to be prepared to share screen with an IDE: however I was not asked coding questions throughout. # Round 1: Zoom interview The interviewer was a Manager of a group peer to the group I was interviewing for. ### Questions: * In-depth architecture review of one of my projects: individual components, how they were scaled, communication between components, overall data flow, scheduling of jobs and tasks * Java JDBC API: describe the typical flow, classes involved and connection pooling * Java facilities for automatic closing of resources * Describe newer features of Java language found most useful * Level of experience with relational databases and SQL (I honestly said I use RDBMs, but not an expert) * Technologies used to implement REST APIs * HTTP protocol, various request methods, differences between GET and POST * Typical payload formats in POST requests * Experience with Spring Boot, what are the main concepts Given that the interviewer was a peer Manager and not th hiring Manager, the interviewer said they could not answer questions about the role I was interviewing for. One takeaway: most of the US group is based in Boston; there is a heavy India presence, but I felt that development is not India dominated # Round 2: Zoom interview This interviewer was also a Manager of another peer group ### Questions: * Descrive dealing with data quality issues, validations before data even gets into the system * Diagnose production problems: how to instantly know what went wrong, what can be done other than thread dump * Production problems in containers in the absence of facilities to login to physical servers: what if Splunk is either down or is not showing anything * What can we use Semaphors for * Have I used JMS systems, RabbitMQ specifically * How are messages processed by subscribers on Kafka (I think the interviewer had the JMS pattern in mind: messages received on a dispatch threads and enqueued for processing by a worker pool) * Newer Java language features (same as the first interviewer), had I used Virtual Threads # Result: Received an e-mail from the recruiter: * The level of expertise did not meet expectation for Director-level role * Java fundamentals and HTTP protocol is good, but lacked developing service APIs, Springboot and SQL # Impressions: Overall, I felt that the role was not what I thought it was based on the Job Description: * JD sounded like server-side Java engineering, with mentions of large scale simulations, scenarios and scalability to 1000s of users * The recruiter initially stated that the most important skills the team needed were Java and AWS, having experience with RIsk Systems a huge plus The rejection e-mail made it sound like the role was really Full Stack Development rather than performance critical server side Java engineering Also, even though the role was listed as Quant-focused, neither of the two interviewers seemed to be doing anything Quantitative. There were no business questions.