1. What is a QA Engineer at Akur8?

As a QA Engineer at Akur8, you are the gatekeeper of quality for a platform that is revolutionizing insurance pricing. Akur8 builds AI-driven pricing software for insurance companies, meaning the applications you test are highly complex, data-heavy, and mission-critical. Actuaries and pricing teams around the world rely on this platform to make multi-million dollar decisions, making your role essential to the company's success and client trust.

In this position, you will go beyond basic manual testing. You will design, implement, and scale automated testing frameworks that ensure the reliability, performance, and accuracy of sophisticated machine learning-driven SaaS products. Your work directly impacts how quickly and safely the engineering teams can deploy new features to production.

You will collaborate closely with software engineers, data scientists, and product managers to understand intricate business logic and translate it into robust test cases. If you thrive in a fast-paced scale-up environment and enjoy untangling complex systems to find hidden edge cases, this role offers a unique opportunity to shape the quality standards of a leading InsurTech platform.

2. Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for the Akur8 interview process requires a balance of technical sharpness and immense stamina. The hiring team is looking for candidates who not only possess strong automation skills but also demonstrate the resilience to thrive in a high-visibility, dynamic environment.

Here are the key evaluation criteria you will be measured against:

Technical Testing Proficiency – You need a deep understanding of both manual and automated testing. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to design scalable test frameworks, write clean automation code, and test complex APIs and user interfaces. You demonstrate strength here by explaining the "why" behind your tool choices and architectural testing decisions.

System Thinking and Problem Solving – Akur8's platform involves heavy data processing and complex algorithms. You will be evaluated on your ability to understand the broader system architecture, identify potential points of failure, and troubleshoot complex bugs. Strong candidates approach problems methodically and can break down large systems into testable components.

Executive Communication and Culture Fit – Because Akur8 is a scale-up with a relatively flat leadership structure, you will interact with senior leadership. Interviewers, including C-level executives, will assess your adaptability, your ability to handle ambiguity, and how clearly you communicate technical risks to non-technical stakeholders.

Resilience and Adaptability – The company operates in a fast-evolving market, which sometimes leads to internal reorganizations or shifting priorities. You will be evaluated on your ability to stay focused, flexible, and positive when navigating changes in project scope or team structure.

3. Interview Process Overview

The interview process at Akur8 for a QA Engineer is exceptionally thorough and rigorous. It is designed not just to test your technical abilities, but to ensure deep alignment with the company's culture and long-term vision. You should expect an extensive journey that can span several weeks to over three months, depending on scheduling and internal team dynamics.

You will typically start with standard HR and technical screening rounds. However, as you progress, the process expands significantly. Candidates often face up to 8 distinct interviews, meeting with engineering peers, QA managers, cross-functional team leads, and ultimately the CTO and CEO. The company places a massive premium on executive approval, meaning the final stages are heavily focused on your strategic mindset and cultural alignment.

Additionally, Akur8 heavily values in-person interaction for final evaluations. You may be asked to fly to their headquarters in Paris or a regional office for an intensive onsite loop, which can consist of up to four back-to-back interviews in a single day.

This visual timeline outlines the typical progression from your initial recruiter screen through the technical assessments, onsite loops, and final executive interviews. Use this to pace your preparation; focus heavily on your core automation skills for the early rounds, and pivot toward behavioral, architectural, and high-level strategy prep as you approach the executive stages.

4. Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed, you must prove your capabilities across a spectrum of technical and behavioral domains. Akur8 interviewers will probe deeply into your past experiences and present you with hypothetical scenarios relevant to their SaaS platform.

Test Automation and Framework Design

Because Akur8 moves quickly, manual testing alone is insufficient. You will be heavily evaluated on your ability to build, maintain, and scale automated testing frameworks. Strong performance means you can discuss the pros and cons of different tools (like Cypress, Selenium, or Playwright) and explain how you structure your code for reusability and maintainability.

Be ready to go over:

• UI Automation – Interacting with complex, data-rich dashboards.
• API Testing – Validating RESTful endpoints, checking payload structures, and handling authentication.
• CI/CD Integration – Hooking your tests into pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins) to block bad deployments.
• Test Data Management – Handling state and mock data in environments where data is highly dynamic.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you would build an automation framework from scratch for a new web application."
• "How do you handle flaky tests in your CI/CD pipeline?"
• "Describe a time you had to mock a third-party service to test your application's behavior."

System Architecture and Root Cause Analysis

Akur8's software is not a simple CRUD application; it involves complex pricing algorithms. Interviewers want to see that you can understand the underlying architecture of the system you are testing. You should be able to trace a bug from the UI down to the database or backend service.

Be ready to go over:

• Microservices Testing – Understanding how different services interact and how to test integration points.
• Database Validation – Writing SQL queries to verify that the UI reflects the correct underlying data.
• Log Analysis – Using tools like Kibana, Datadog, or simple terminal commands to find errors.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "A user reports that a pricing model took 10 minutes to generate instead of the usual 2 minutes. How do you investigate this?"
• "Explain how you would test a microservice that consumes messages from a queue and writes to a database."

Behavioral and Executive Alignment

Because you will likely interview with the CTO and CEO, your behavioral preparation is just as critical as your technical prep. These leaders are looking for candidates who take ownership, communicate clearly, and can handle the pressures of a growing scale-up. They want to see that you are not just a task-executor, but a strategic thinker.

Be ready to go over:

• Handling Ambiguity – Operating effectively when requirements are unclear or changing.
• Stakeholder Management – Pushing back on engineering or product when quality standards are not met.
• Drive and Motivation – Why you want to join an InsurTech company and what you bring to the culture.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a developer about a bug's severity. How did you resolve it?"
• "Describe a situation where the project scope changed drastically midway through. How did you adapt your test strategy?"
• "Why Akur8, and how do you handle rapidly shifting priorities?"

5. Key Responsibilities

As a QA Engineer at Akur8, your day-to-day work is deeply embedded in the software development lifecycle. You will be responsible for defining test strategies for new features before a single line of code is written, working alongside product managers to ensure acceptance criteria are testable and comprehensive.

A major part of your role involves writing and maintaining automated test scripts for both frontend interfaces and backend APIs. You will continuously monitor the health of the CI/CD pipelines, investigating test failures, identifying flaky tests, and ensuring that the engineering team receives fast, reliable feedback on their commits. When complex bugs arise, you will lead the triage process, digging into logs and databases to provide developers with precise steps to reproduce the issue.

Beyond daily testing, you will act as a quality advocate across the organization. You will collaborate with developers to promote better unit and integration testing practices, help design performance and load testing strategies for data-heavy operations, and continuously research new QA tools to improve the team's efficiency.

6. Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for the QA Engineer role at Akur8, your profile should demonstrate a strong mix of coding ability, testing methodology, and soft skills.

• Must-have skills – Proven experience building UI and API test automation from scratch. Proficiency in at least one programming language (such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or Java). Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and version control (Git). Excellent English communication skills to interact with global teams and senior leadership.
• Experience level – Typically, candidates need 3 to 5+ years of dedicated QA engineering experience, preferably within a B2B SaaS, FinTech, or data-heavy product environment.
• Soft skills – High autonomy, strong analytical thinking, and the ability to articulate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders. You must possess the resilience to navigate a fast-paced environment and the patience to endure a rigorous hiring process.
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience with performance testing tools (like JMeter or k6). A background in InsurTech or an understanding of machine learning models and how to test non-deterministic systems.

7. Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent the types of technical and behavioral inquiries you will face during the Akur8 process. While the exact wording will vary based on your interviewer, these cover the core patterns you must master.

Automation and Technical Testing

Interviewers will test your hands-on experience with automation tools and your ability to write reliable tests.

• How do you decide which test cases to automate and which to keep manual?
• Walk me through the architecture of the automation framework you are currently using.
• How do you handle testing an API endpoint that returns a large, complex JSON payload?
• Explain the concept of the Page Object Model (POM). What are its advantages?
• How would you structure tests for an application that requires multiple user roles and permissions?

Problem Solving and Architecture

These questions assess your ability to think beyond the UI and understand the entire tech stack.

• If an automated test fails in the CI pipeline but passes locally, how do you troubleshoot it?
• Describe how you would test a feature that relies heavily on a third-party integration.
• What metrics do you use to measure the quality of a release?
• How do you approach testing a system where the expected output might slightly vary (like an AI model)?

Behavioral and Leadership

Expect these questions heavily in the later stages, especially with managers and C-level executives.

• Tell me about a time you missed a critical bug that made it to production. What was the impact, and how did you improve your process?
• Describe a time you had to advocate for quality when the team was rushing to meet a deadline.
• How do you handle a situation where a developer says "it works on my machine"?
• Tell me about a time you had to adapt to a major organizational change or project pivot.

8. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How long does the interview process typically take? The process at Akur8 is notably long and can take anywhere from a few weeks to over three months. With up to 8 rounds of interviews, including executive approvals, you should expect delays and periods of waiting.

Q: Will I be required to travel for the interview? Yes, it is highly likely. Akur8 often requires candidates to fly to their headquarters in Paris or a regional office for an onsite loop. This usually involves a full day of back-to-back interviews.

Q: Why do I have to interview with the CTO and CEO for a QA role? Akur8 maintains a high bar for cultural fit and strategic alignment across the company. The founders and C-suite are deeply involved in hiring to ensure that every new team member shares their vision and can handle the demands of a scaling startup.

Q: What is the technical difficulty of the interviews? The technical difficulty is generally considered "average" compared to FAANG companies. They are less focused on complex algorithmic puzzles (LeetCode) and more focused on practical, real-world automation, API testing, and system troubleshooting.

Q: What happens if there is an internal reorganization during my interview process? Because Akur8 is a fast-growing company, internal shifts can happen. If your process is paused or a role is reopened later, stay professional. You can decide if you want to re-engage, but be prepared that you may need to repeat certain steps or travel again.

9. Other General Tips

• Prepare for a Marathon: Treat this interview process as an endurance event. Do not let the length of the process or the number of interviews diminish your energy. Bring the same enthusiasm to interview number 8 as you did to interview number 1.
• Clarify Logistics Early: Because travel may be required, clarify expectations regarding flights, accommodations, and scheduling early in the process with your HR contact to avoid logistical headaches later.

• Focus on the "Why": When discussing your past projects, emphasize why you chose specific tools or strategies. Akur8 leaders appreciate candidates who think critically about their technical choices rather than just following instructions.
• Understand the Domain: While you don't need to be an actuary, showing a basic understanding of how insurance pricing works, or how machine learning models operate, will significantly set you apart from other candidates.
• Interview the Interviewers: Use your time with the CTO and CEO to ask strategic questions about the company's growth, how QA fits into their long-term vision, and how they handle technical debt. This demonstrates leadership and business acumen.

10. Summary & Next Steps

Securing a QA Engineer role at Akur8 is a challenging but highly rewarding endeavor. You are stepping into a company that is at the cutting edge of InsurTech, working with complex AI models and critical enterprise software. The impact of your work will be immediate and highly visible, safeguarding the quality of a platform trusted by global insurance leaders.

To succeed, focus your preparation on mastering practical test automation, understanding full-stack system architecture, and polishing your behavioral responses for executive-level scrutiny. Remember that endurance is just as important as technical skill in this specific interview loop. Stay patient, maintain clear communication with your recruiters, and treat every round as an opportunity to showcase your problem-solving mindset.

This compensation data provides a baseline for what you might expect in this role. Keep in mind that exact offers will vary based on your location (e.g., Paris vs. regional hubs), your seniority, and how well you perform across the extensive interview loop. Use this information to anchor your salary expectations confidently when the time comes.

You have the skills and the context needed to navigate this rigorous process. Take the time to review your foundational QA concepts, practice your system architecture explanations, and prepare your behavioral stories. For more insights, practice questions, and peer experiences, continue exploring resources on Dataford. Good luck—you are well-prepared to tackle the Akur8 interview journey!