🚀 Ace your QA Tech interview
How does the tech interview for a QA or SDET leader look in 2025? What type of interviews are conducted, and what strategies could help you land your next role? Let’s unpack all these and more in this
I recently completed full interview loops at multiple companies, including startups, product, and Big Tech.
I was targeting 2 major role archetypes.
Engineering manager - QA role expected to support a team of 6 - 12 QA engineers or SDETs
Senior IC (Individual contributor) or Tech lead roles focused on engineering productivity.
In this blog, I’ll share my personal experience navigating these interview loops,
If you or a friend is looking for similar opportunities, this blog should provide a good mental model on what kind of interview rounds exist and how you can orient yourself to perform well in these interviews.
Let’s go 🏃
Why target both IC and EM roles? 🤾
You may wonder why I didn't focus on just one role.
The reason is quite simple for me.
I enjoy hands-on work that delves deep into technologies, and I also love working with and mentoring people, often preferring roles that push the boundaries.
I’ve played three major variations of these roles in the past five years.
Hands-on Engineering Manager (EM) at Gojek
Senior IC focused on building test infrastructure and frameworks in a complex technology landscape at Meta.
Principal IC supporting a group of engineers at CRED
And I enjoyed both aspects quite well.
If you personally have a strong inclination for either IC or EM roles, it's fine to only target such roles and companies. It would also make the decision process smoother for you later on, as you can avoid doing an Apple 🍎 to Oranges 🍊comparison.
What are the major interview types? 🤔
I’ve mainly seen the following types of rounds.
We’ll divide it into 3 main types of conversations – Technical, Behavioural, and Recruiter, each with its focus and expectations.
Technical: The main questions that this loop tries to answer are: Are you a fit technically for this role? Can you raise the engineering bar from your skills, past experiences, and attitude
Behavioral: Do you have the right attitude, and how do you work on all the nontechnical stuff – communication, collaboration, conflict resolution
Recruiter: Initially, to identify if you are in the ballpark vicinity of someone who can do this job, and how much it would cost the company.
Let’s form a high-level intuition first before going deeper.
Introductory call
A short 30m - 45m call with the hiring manager or recruiter to align on a high level if the role seems like a mutual fit
Technical rounds (45m to 1h 30m)
Here few rounds are unique to Big Tech companies vs startups/product companies.
Big Tech
Coding rounds: focused on problem solving on an algorithmic or data structures problem, and your communication skills as you work through them.
System design – design a large-scale distributed system or a core engineering system like log processing, build tools, etc.
Startups and product
Take-home assignment: Build an automation framework on either API, web, or mobile, based on your preference, and using open-source tools and libraries.
Technical discussion on framework design and tradeoffs: if company does take home assignments, you’ll have to explain your design choices and answer follow up questions or if is the first round, this could be a problem statement given on the spot targeting API, Web or Mobile use case, and you’ll have to explain the framework design by breaking down components