QinetiQ Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process didn't involve any live coding. It mainly consisted of general questions about your background and university projects. They gave a brief summary of what to expect in the role. Overall, it was a relaxed and straightforward interview.

The interviewers were pretty professional and nice, they seemed to want to help. But I'm just not good at interviews. I messed up the easy questions. About a week after, I had another interview and got an offer to do pretty much the same job. I later heard from the recruiter that the position was no longer funded and they didn't reach out because they were trying to change direction. I'm actually glad it worked out this way. I guess the takeaway is that you don't really know what the interviewers are thinking. Don't let it get you down, just keep looking.

So the interview process was kinda comically bad. The first two rounds were okay, but the final round was a disaster. A red flag was they only wanted to interview me for an associate role even though I had two years of experience. Another red flag was the recruiter saying $100k was too much, I eventually got paid $140k. They had me do five back-to-back 45-minute interviews with cameras on, from like 10 AM to 2 PM with no breaks or lunch. Every interviewer went over time, making me late for the next one and 30 minutes over schedule. The first interviewer spent most of the time asking about my technical experience and only gave me a coding question with 10 minutes left. He read it aloud without examples or a way to re-read it, and the coding website kept crashing and deleting my work. The second interviewer seemed unprepared and awkward, I mostly led that interview. The third interview was weird because they asked me about code I was supposed to have written in an earlier interview, but they scheduled the interviews in the wrong order. The fourth was with the director and was actually good. The fifth and last interview was the coding question I was supposed to get at the beginning: write pseudocode for a program to create a solved Sudoku board. It was okay but out of order. The interviews themselves were rough, but I was more put off by the interviewers. I'm a 23-year-old female software engineer and all seven interviewers were white men over 50. If they want to hire female engineers, they need to show them successful women at the company.