My YOE: 10 Years as Automation Test Engineer

Thank you, LeetCode. It is my turn now to contribute to the online community that helped me secure an offer with one of the faang companies.

Experience:
Phone Interview (1 hour): Started with an easy LC problem and ended with two LP questions. Got the result the same day night. I asked for five weeks of preparation for virtual onsite.
Virtual Onsite: Five rounds (1 hour) + 1 chat with lunch buddy(30 minutes). First round had coding question. All the rounds had LP, testing methodology, scenario enumeration, automation debugging and scenario debugging questions.

Tips:
Tip 1: Leadership principles: The Most important competency. Can’t stress this enough. Please come up with two good stories from your past experience for each of the 14 leadership principles. My strategy: I wrote down 30 stories initially, read them and scored them. If some story did not feel good, I removed it and thought of some-other situation from my experience and re-wrote them. Be truthful about the experiences. Interviewers go very deep into them as follow-up questions.

Tip 2: Get Leetcode premium and work towards solving Amazon tagged easy questions (minimum 100). For QAE this is sufficient from my experience. Understand the problem instead of memorizing certain parts of the solution.

Tip 3: Ask for time to prepare, do your work and don’t stress yourself or your family. I went with the flow and I did not have any plan to solve these many problems by this time. This was my second attempt and I remember during the first time I was really stressed out and worked really hard to stick to the plan. Not being stressful definitely had its impact.

All in all I had a very good discussion with the interviewers. I was tired at the end but I enjoyed the process.