The process started with a quick 20-minute phone screen with someone from HR. She was upfront about what to expect at each stage, so there were no surprises later on. No trick questions, just a casual conversation about my background and what I was looking for.

The next round was with the hiring manager and one member of the team. I walked in expecting the usual grilling, but it felt more like a conversation than an interrogation. They asked about a couple of projects on my resume and let me actually talk through my thinking instead of cutting me off. At one point I blanked on a detail and just said so — nobody blinked, they just moved on.

Walk me through how you'd design an automated test suite for a new feature from scratch.

What's the difference between a flaky test and a genuinely failing test, and how do you handle flaky tests in a CI pipeline?

Write a script to test a simple API endpoint — validate status code, response schema, and a couple of edge cases.

How would you decide what to automate versus what to leave as manual/exploratory testing?