QA Automation / SDET Interview Prep & Rubrics

Automation framework design, tool depth, the SDET coding round, and CI integration.

The loop, in order

QA & Testing33 questions · 13 topicsThe full QA spectrum kept deliberately separate: manual craft, automation engineering, and performance testing are different interviews with different rubrics.
Data Structures & Algorithms44 questions · 16 topicsDSA interview questions organised by tested pattern: arrays, hashing, rotated arrays, dynamic programming, graphs, heaps and sliding windows, so you learn transferable coding-round techniques instead of memorising puzzles.
Backend Engineering26 questions · 7 topicsLanguage-agnostic service engineering: the protocols, boundaries, and failure handling that sit between a coding round and a full system design round.
DevOps & Cloud37 questions · 8 topicsPlatform and infrastructure questions for DevOps, SRE, and any backend role expected to own its service in production.
Behavioural & Culture Fit21 questions · 8 topicsThe round candidates most often under-prepare, treated as a skill with structure rather than small talk, including the rubric interviewers score against.
HR, Screening & Offer18 questions · 6 topicsThe recruiter and HR rounds that gate the technical loop and decide your compensation, where most candidates improvise and lose money.

Latest for this track

hardConceptScenarioDesign

Your consumer-driven contract test passes in CI, but production rejects a request because a supposedly optional field is missing. What did the contract testing actually miss?

The contract captured the shape the consumer sends, not the rules the provider enforces. Optionality lived in the schema while the real requirement lived in provider validation, and no recorded example ever omitted the field. Contract tests only verify interactions they contain, so add the negative example and verify against real code.

Api Testing4 minmid, senior, staff

mediumCodingConcept

Edit distance where insert costs 1, delete costs 2 and replace costs 3. Define the DP state and the recurrence, and tell me what changes from the classic version.

The state is unchanged - the minimum cost to transform the first i characters of one string into the first j of the other - because the subproblem structure does not depend on what operations cost. Only the recurrence changes, adding a per-operation weight instead of a uniform 1, and the base cases become multiples of the insert and delete costs rather than i and j.

Dynamic Programming4 minmid, senior

hardConceptScenarioDesign

Your error budget burn alert pages every few hours, but half the time nobody outside the team has noticed anything. How do you tune it without simply making it quieter?

A single threshold on a single window cannot separate a real outage from a brief spike, so it either pages on noise or misses slow burns. Replace it with multi-window multi-burn-rate alerting: a fast rule that pages and a slow rule that files a ticket, each gated by a short window so a spike that already stopped does not keep paging.

Sre And Reliability5 minmid, senior, staff

mediumConceptDesignScenario

Two clients open the same record, both edit it, and the second save silently overwrites the first. How would you use ETags to turn that lost update into something the client can see and handle?

Return a strong ETag on GET, require If-Match on writes, and reject a stale token with 412 Precondition Failed so a lost update becomes a visible error rather than silent data loss. What makes it correct is that the comparison and the write must be one atomic operation - an UPDATE guarded by the version in its WHERE clause - because a SELECT then UPDATE reintroduces the race.

Http And Rest4 minmid, senior, staff

mediumScenarioCodingConcept

A Playwright test clicks a button that is visibly on screen, and roughly one run in twenty nothing happens. The button is server-rendered but the app hydrates after load. Why does the click get lost, and how do you fix the flake properly?

Playwright actionability checks pass on server-rendered markup because the element is attached, visible, stable and enabled - none of which imply React has attached its listener. The click lands on inert HTML, so this is a race with hydration, not a timing problem. Wait on a readiness signal the app exposes deliberately.

Playwright And Cypress4 minmid, senior, staff

hardScenarioConceptDesign

Pods are being evicted during node pressure even though your CPU dashboards look fine. Where do you look, and what would you change so it stops?

CPU is compressible, so the kubelet throttles it rather than evicting for it. Eviction comes from memory, ephemeral storage or inodes - and which pods die is decided by QoS class, not by who caused the pressure. Check node conditions and eviction thresholds first, then fix the requests and limits so critical workloads are Guaranteed rather than BestEffort.

Kubernetes4 minmid, senior, staff