Hortonworks Test Automation Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interviewers all seemed to be of the same race and many weren't really listening to my answers. It felt like they just knew LeetCode and only asked questions from there.

So I was interviewed for the Software Development Engineer Test role in Bangalore. A recruiter reached out and after a quick background check, set up a phone screen. The phone screen had some basic scripting and programming questions, which I felt I did well on. This led to an onsite interview where I had 5 one-on-one sessions. They were all technical, focusing on algorithms and data structures. I spoke with two SDETs, the hiring manager, a senior development manager, and the general manager. I thought the GM would ask about culture fit, but surprisingly, he drilled down on technical topics like data structures, modeling, and complexity. There was a debrief afterward, which went well, but they wanted me to read up on the company. Then, they arranged two more phone rounds with people in the US, which HR said would be the final stages. These focused on programming and automation frameworks. The first US interviewer was good, but the second one, a tech lead, didn't ask very challenging or logic-heavy questions – probably the most average interview of the lot. Meanwhile, HR asked for payslips and compensation details, and things seemed positive. Then, out of the blue, the HR and hiring manager called and said I'd have to wait two months because they were now looking for people with UI automation framework experience and at a senior level. I pointed out that this wasn't in the job description, my resume clearly stated I lacked UI automation experience and wasn't a lead. I questioned why the interviews weren't focused on UI automation if that's what they wanted. It didn't make sense. I also questioned how one average interview could override positive feedback from all others. They mentioned my coding, problem-solving, and DS feedback was excellent but UI and web service testing knowledge was limited, hence the two-month wait. I felt it was a waste of my time and energy. The interviews were fine, except the last one with the US tech lead, which was interesting and challenging. But the overall hiring strategy seemed confused, with one person's decision impacting the whole process. I emailed HR about the poor resume selection and wasted time. It was a really bad experience: a full day of programming interviews, a late-night US call, and then a flimsy reason to wait. I told HR I was no longer interested in waiting and to proceed with other candidates. Overall, a very frustrating experience.

It was a 4 round Skype interview process. The first round was about finding processes running on port 80 and killing them using Unix commands, and replacing all occurrences of / with \ in a file. Then there were 3 rounds of onsite interviews. The first onsite round focused on coding prowess, the second on data structures, and the third on questions about Linux FS traversal, Selenium, and REST APIs.