I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Fidelity Investments in Sep 2025
Interview
I interviewed twice with them with both times being ghosted. Last year interviews was different then this year. Last year was 2 interviews. The recruiter call and technical interview that seems to have varied from person to person. I got asked UML/OOP (animals in a zoo), SQL (inner join), reverse a linked list, and make a real-time clock with JavaScript. No behavioral. The interviewer was drilling with in depth questions. This year interview consisted of 3 interviews. A recruiter call, 30min behavioral, and 30min technical, Behavioral and technical were on the same day after each other with different interviewers on site. Behavioral did involve talking about technical concepts as well. For the technical, there was no laptops or whiteboards to solve the coding problem. I got asked how I would find the first non duplicate character in a string. The rest of the interview was technical concepts that weren't directly involved with tech stack of the role. It was like "how do you maintain your code?", "how do you find a bug that happens infrequently?", "how do you go about understanding a codebase that has no documentation?", etc. Barely any OOP, SQL, Java, questions. For both I was told by the recruiters to wait a week to hear back with results. Both times I was ghosted. No message, email, or phone call. The least a company you've invested time with could do is give you a response back. Everyone was really nice and helpful. However, very unprofessional and disappointed with the ghosting.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Tell me about yourself.
2. What are the 4 principles of OOP? know the difference btwn them too.
3. Have you used Agile before? How?
4. Tell me about your project (on resume).
5. Why Fidelity?
6. Do you know git?
7. What does git add, push, commit do?
8. something about git types (i forgot)
9. Tell me about a time you faced a conflict in a team.
10. Tell me about a time you had to step out your comfort zone.
11. How would you explain a complex topic in simple terms to someone who doesn't know anything about it? like API?
12. Tell me about a time you had to learn new technology
13. You have a zoo that contains animals, design a basic uml to represent that.
14. Know DISTINCT, LIKE, inner join, left/right join for sql
15. Reverse a linked list
16. Real-time clock with javascript
17. find the first non duplicate character in a string
18. how do you maintain your code?
19. how do you go about understanding a codebase that has no documentation?
20. how do you find a bug that happens infrequently?
Recruiter reached out after applying through their website and went through a phone screening that was a run through of my resume. After the phone screening I was scheduled for a panel interview (2 senior employees) about a week later. The recruiter explicitly mentioned how the interview would be non-technical (explicitly said "no live coding") and at most there would be a whiteboard problem, for instance hand-writing basic SQL code, and conceptual questions about algorithms, data structures, SQL commands, polymorphism and inheritance. He mentioned that the program was moving away from "traditional SWE" and more toward candidates with an understanding of generating business value. However, there seemed to be a disconnect between the panel interviewers and the recruiter on this information. The interview started with only 2 questions from my resume and then went straight into 3 live-coding technicals (1 in Java, 1 in Python, 1 in HTML). The interviewers mentioned how they had been interviewing for many years for the program but had never done a panel interview like this one. The disorganization was apparent as they clearly had different interviewing styles. For anyone interviewing I would recommend practicing coding questions on java, python, html, and sql for the interview because no matter the change in program, it was clear the interviewers are still judging your coding skills. The questions are not difficult though and the interviewers will help you out when needed. The interviewers put in their recommendations to the LEAP program at EOD but were uncertain about the timeline for when I would hear back. Overall, the process was not technically difficult but extremely frustrating because of the misinformation and panel structure.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Solve a string splicing problem in Java and Python (had to use both languages)
I applied online. I interviewed at Fidelity Investments
Interview
easy behavioral questions. Leetcode easy. Asked about how to reverse string and how to populate a multiplication table. I did it using java, but did not optimized the code. In addition having no mobile dev experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked about how to reverse string and how to populate a multiplication table.