Fidelity | Director (Individual Contributor) | Jersey City | Feb 2026 [Reject]

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.