Cohesity Test Automation Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied on the company website and HR called me for an in-person interview at their office. There were four rounds. The first round involved discussing my past work, my approach to test framework development, and then designing a distributed file transfer client-server system. I also had to code some parts of it. The interviewer was nice and asked questions well. The second round focused on system testing and writing tests for specific scenarios. The third round was about programming and automation. The fourth round covered testing concepts, system design, and debugging. I felt I did well in all interviews. HR said the feedback was positive, but there was an issue with their internal system for tracking my profile, which they said would take about a week to fix. I tried contacting HR but got no response. After much effort, I contacted some HR people on LinkedIn to finalize my application, and the next day I received a standard rejection email. Later, I found out the real reason was they couldn't match my current compensation. I wish they had told me the actual reason instead of rejecting me without explanation. I enjoyed the process and the people, but their decision-making process was flawed. If you can't afford a candidate, don't waste their time.

So, first there was a HackerEarth test. After that, I had one telephonic interview, then an onsite interview. The onsite part had 2 rounds conducted by people from the US over Webex, and then 2 more rounds with the local Bangalore team. Overall, the interview process was good. Once I cleared the HackerEarth test and the telephonic round, I got the call for the onsite interview. I think the telephonic round was conducted from the US, and the interviewer was nice and got straight to the point. They asked about my fundamentals, my previous work experience, my Linux knowledge, and my understanding of distributed systems and storage. The onsite interviews were scheduled and organized well, and the process felt smoother. During the interviews, they wanted to understand my skill set, see if it matched their needs, and also asked about my past work and how well I understood the projects I worked on. There were 2 coding rounds, which is typical for startups like Cohesity, and they also asked about other areas like Testing, Test planning, and Debugging. Overall, it was a positive experience, and I accepted the offer.

So I had this interview about a month ago, around the end of December or beginning of January. The first part was an online coding test on HackerEarth, then there was a phone call. Honestly, the experience was really bad. The interviewer was late, and it took 30 minutes for someone to show up after I contacted HR. This person started with a coding question that I finished in under 5 minutes. The interviewer couldn't grasp the logic, even when I walked through the code line by line. I offered to show the output from my IDE, but they refused. Then, we moved on to storage and virtualization questions. It seemed like they were looking up questions online and expected textbook answers. For example, if asked about a 'mobile phone,' they wanted the exact definition, like 'it is an electronic device used for communicating.' If you phrased it differently, they'd press you to use their specific wording. It was strange because I worked in core virtualization, and they weren't satisfied with my explanation, likely wanting a specific sentence from their notes. They seemed to get stuck on answers and gave odd replies. I was considering this role even though I had good stock options at my current company, but after this interview, I'm glad I didn't proceed. Even if I had passed, I wouldn't have gone to the next stage. It was a really pathetic experience, and I hope they maintain higher standards.