o9 Solutions Interview Questions
& Process

So I interviewed for the QA Engineer II role. The first interview was pretty good, the interviewer knew their stuff and asked solid technical questions about automation testing. But the second round was a letdown. The interviewer seemed checked out, really disengaged, and honestly didn't seem to know much about automation testing. It felt like they just rolled out of bed. Even though I answered everything right, I got rejected. When I asked HR for feedback, they had nothing to give, which felt really unprofessional given how much time I put in. My advice to HR: make sure interviewers are prepped and qualified, especially for senior roles. Maybe some training would help. And for goodness sake, give us some feedback, good or bad.

The interviewer probably asked about your resume, like your past experiences and projects. Make sure you can talk about what you've done and the tech you've used. Then, expect some Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) questions, maybe some coding problems or just talking about concepts like arrays, linked lists, trees, graphs, sorting, and searching. They might also ask about Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts like encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction, maybe showing how you'd use them in code or with design patterns. Since you're into Generative AI and LLMs, they'll likely ask technical questions about that.

The whole interview process took more than 2 weeks from when they first reached out. There were 3 interview rounds in total. The first two were technical interviews where they wanted to know about my background, the products I've developed, and assess my product management skills through various tasks. They also asked about the design process for manufacturing and supply chains, how to increase business profits, root cause analysis, and SQL queries involving join functions. The final round was with the Hiring Manager, who surprisingly asked logical reasoning questions, similar to those found on Geeksforgeeks, which I wasn't expecting for a Technical Product Manager role.

I had a Hackerrank test with 20 questions covering many topics. Then, I interviewed with the WebApi team. The first round was with a Senior Software Engineer (SSE). We discussed C#, advanced topics, SQL, and DSA. Some questions were tricky but interesting. The interviewer was mostly respectful, and by the end, it felt like we were already colleagues, discussing C# and microservices knowledge. The second round was a really bad experience. The interviewer, a Software Architect from the same team, joined late with his camera off. He reviewed my GitHub and asked me to find 5 mistakes in my personal project code. He claimed to find only 3, then pointed out just one mistake that wasn't even in production code. He then lectured me on registering HttpClientFactory, stating I hadn't implemented it, even though it was in my code. He couldn't analyze my DDD-based code properly, showing a negative attitude and superiority complex. It seemed he wasn't assessing my skills but trying to belittle me. He wasted a lot of time on this. He asked how to test service code without an interface, which took 15 minutes and was pointless as it's a bad practice. Then, he asked me to recite a LINQ statement in Visual Studio. He also took 15 minutes to ask a basic question about distributed transactions. When I answered correctly, he spoke rudely and belittled me, even remarking I'd never develop a fault-tolerant system (my answer about 2-phase commit was correct). With 3 minutes left, he asked if I had questions, but I was exhausted and declined. A key takeaway is to end interviews immediately if the interviewer is disrespectful. The first interviewer asked tough but respectful questions, even though I had relevant experience.