What is a QA Engineer at Huntington?

As a QA Engineer at Huntington, you are the critical safeguard between complex financial software and the millions of customers who rely on it daily. Your role is essential to ensuring the quality, security, and stability of the bank's digital products. From consumer-facing mobile banking applications to internal loan origination systems, your work directly impacts the financial well-being and trust of the bank's user base.

This position goes far beyond simply executing manual test cases. You will be expected to drive automation, identify deep-seated system vulnerabilities, and collaborate closely with developers to build quality into the software from the ground up. At Huntington, the scale of data and the strict regulatory environment mean that your testing strategies must be rigorous, repeatable, and highly accurate.

You can expect an environment that balances traditional financial compliance with an increasing push toward modern agile delivery. The role offers a unique opportunity to tackle complex, high-stakes problem spaces while directly contributing to a seamless, secure user experience. If you are passionate about precision and user advocacy, this role will provide a challenging and highly rewarding career path.

Common Interview Questions

The following questions are representative of what candidates face during the QA Engineer interview process at Huntington. While you should not memorize answers, you should use these examples to understand the patterns of inquiry and to prepare structured, experience-based responses.

Technical & Automation Testing

This category tests your practical knowledge of building and maintaining test frameworks. Interviewers want to know that you can write efficient code to automate repetitive tasks.

• How do you handle dynamic web elements that frequently change their IDs or classes in Selenium?
• Explain the difference between smoke testing and regression testing, and when you would automate each.
• Walk me through how you perform API testing and what specific assertions you typically include.
• How do you integrate your automated test suite into a continuous integration pipeline?
• Write a SQL query to find duplicate records in a customer transaction table.

Behavioral & Leadership

These questions evaluate your soft skills, your ability to work within a team, and how you handle the inherent pressures of software delivery.

• Tell me about a time you had to push back on a release because the quality did not meet standards.
• Describe a conflict you had with a developer regarding a bug report. How did you resolve it?
• Give an example of a time you took the initiative to improve a testing process on your team.
• How do you handle a situation where requirements for a new feature are vague or constantly changing?
• Tell me about your biggest failure in a previous QA role and what you learned from it.

Scenario-Based Problem Solving

These questions test your ability to think critically about risk and to design comprehensive test strategies on the fly.

• If you were tasked with testing a new login page for a banking application, what would your test plan look like?
• You have 500 automated tests, but the pipeline takes 3 hours to run. How would you optimize it?
• A critical bug is reported in production that your team missed. What are your immediate next steps?

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for your interviews requires a strategic understanding of what the hiring team values most. You should approach your preparation by aligning your past experiences with the core competencies expected of technical talent in the financial sector.

Technical Proficiency – You must demonstrate a strong command of modern testing frameworks, automation tools, and API testing methodologies. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to write clean, maintainable test scripts and your understanding of continuous integration pipelines. You can show strength here by discussing specific tools you have mastered and how you have reduced manual testing overhead in past roles.

Domain Awareness & Risk Management – In banking, bugs can result in significant financial or regulatory consequences. Interviewers will assess how you prioritize testing based on risk and business impact. You should highlight your ability to identify edge cases, handle sensitive data securely, and ensure compliance with strict industry standards.

Problem-Solving Ability – You will be evaluated on how you approach broken code, ambiguous requirements, and complex system architectures. Interviewers want to see a structured approach to debugging and root cause analysis. Demonstrate this by walking through real-world scenarios where you successfully isolated a difficult bug and worked with engineering to resolve it.

Collaboration and Communication – As a QA Engineer, you will constantly interact with product managers, developers, and business stakeholders. The team will look for evidence that you can communicate technical issues clearly and advocate for quality without becoming a bottleneck. Share examples of how you have successfully navigated disagreements over release readiness or bug severity.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a QA Engineer at Huntington has evolved over time to become more streamlined, though it still requires thorough preparation. Recent candidate experiences indicate that the process is generally straightforward and often centers around a consolidated video call format. You will typically face a panel interview designed to assess both your technical capabilities and your behavioral fit in a single, efficient session.

Expect the technical portion to focus heavily on your practical experience with automation frameworks, test planning, and defect lifecycle management. The behavioral portion, usually led by an engineering manager, will probe your past experiences, conflict resolution skills, and alignment with the company's culture. The tone of these interviews is frequently described as friendly and conversational, aiming to understand how you think rather than trying to trick you with obscure puzzles.

While recent processes have moved quickly—sometimes resulting in an offer shortly after the panel interview—historical data shows that timelines can occasionally stretch due to internal HR bottlenecks. You should enter the process prepared for a comprehensive evaluation, but also remain patient and proactive in your communication with the recruiting team.

This visual timeline outlines the typical progression of the QA Engineer interview process at Huntington. It highlights the key stages, from the initial recruiter screen to the combined technical and behavioral panel interview. Use this map to pace your preparation, ensuring you are equally ready to discuss deep technical automation strategies and high-level behavioral scenarios.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Technical Testing & Automation

This is the core of your evaluation. Huntington needs engineers who can build scalable automation suites rather than relying solely on manual validation. Interviewers will assess your hands-on experience with modern testing tools and your ability to design robust test architectures. Strong performance here means confidently discussing how you transition manual test cases into automated scripts and how you integrate them into a CI/CD pipeline.

Be ready to go over:

• UI Automation – Frameworks like Selenium or Cypress, and how you handle dynamic elements, waits, and cross-browser testing.
• API Testing – Validating endpoints using tools like Postman or REST Assured, checking status codes, response payloads, and database state.
• Test Strategy & Planning – How you determine what to automate versus what to test manually, and how you estimate testing effort.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Performance testing (JMeter), security testing basics, and mobile application testing (Appium).

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you would design an automation framework from scratch for a new web application."
• "How do you handle flaky automated tests in your CI/CD pipeline?"
• "Describe a time you had to test an API endpoint that involved complex database state changes."

Behavioral & Cultural Fit

Because you will be working closely with developers and product teams, your ability to collaborate is just as important as your technical skills. This area evaluates your communication style, your ability to handle pushback, and your leadership qualities. A strong candidate provides specific, structured examples using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) that highlight empathy, resilience, and a team-first mindset.

Be ready to go over:

• Conflict Resolution – Navigating disagreements with developers over bug severity or release timelines.
• Adaptability – Handling changing requirements or tight deadlines in an agile environment.
• Ownership – Taking responsibility for the quality of a feature from inception to production.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Mentoring junior QA staff or leading quality initiatives across multiple squads.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you found a critical bug right before a major release. How did you handle it?"
• "Describe a situation where a developer insisted their code was working, but your tests showed otherwise."
• "How do you prioritize your testing tasks when you have multiple tight deadlines?"

Domain Knowledge & Risk Management

Working at Huntington requires an understanding of the stakes involved in financial software. Interviewers want to see that you think about risk, security, and data integrity. Strong candidates will demonstrate an awareness of how to test for edge cases that could result in financial miscalculations or data breaches.

Be ready to go over:

• Data Validation – Ensuring data flows correctly between front-end interfaces and back-end databases.
• Edge Case Identification – Thinking beyond the "happy path" to find vulnerabilities in complex workflows.
• Compliance & Security Awareness – Basic understanding of testing applications that handle sensitive user data (PII).

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How would you test a money transfer feature between two different account types?"
• "What is your approach to testing applications that handle highly sensitive customer data?"
• "Tell me about a time you identified a high-risk edge case that the product team missed."

Key Responsibilities

As a QA Engineer at Huntington, your day-to-day work revolves around ensuring that new features and system updates meet strict quality standards before they reach the customer. You will spend a significant portion of your time writing, maintaining, and executing automated test scripts, while also performing exploratory manual testing for complex new features. You will be responsible for creating detailed test plans, documenting defects clearly, and verifying fixes as they are deployed.

Collaboration is a massive part of this role. You will participate in daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and backlog refinement sessions, working alongside developers and product managers to define acceptance criteria. You will act as the voice of quality, ensuring that edge cases are considered before a single line of code is written.

Additionally, you will drive continuous improvement within the engineering organization. This includes monitoring test execution results in the CI/CD pipeline, investigating test failures, and optimizing test suites to reduce execution time. You may also be tasked with leading testing efforts for large-scale integration projects, coordinating with other QA teams across Huntington to ensure end-to-end system stability.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for the QA Engineer position at Huntington, you must present a blend of strong technical automation skills and excellent communication abilities. The hiring team looks for candidates who can operate independently while seamlessly integrating into an agile team structure.

• Must-have skills – Proficiency in at least one object-oriented programming language (such as Java or C#) for writing automation scripts.
• Must-have skills – Deep experience with UI automation tools (e.g., Selenium) and API testing utilities (e.g., Postman).
• Must-have skills – Strong understanding of SQL for database validation and data creation.
• Must-have skills – Experience working within Agile/Scrum methodologies and using tools like Jira for defect tracking.
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience with performance testing tools or mobile automation frameworks.
• Nice-to-have skills – Prior experience working in the banking, financial services, or highly regulated industries.
• Nice-to-have skills – Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and modern CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI).

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult are the interviews for the QA Engineer role? Recent candidate experiences rate the difficulty as easy to average. The technical questions are generally practical and related to everyday QA tasks rather than abstract algorithmic puzzles. If you have solid, hands-on experience with automation and API testing, you should feel confident.

Q: How long does the interview process typically take? While recent data shows that candidates can move from a panel interview to an offer very quickly, historically, Huntington has experienced delays in the hiring process. It is best to expect a timeline of 2 to 4 weeks, but be prepared for potential lags in HR communication.

Q: What is the format of the technical interview? You will likely face a video call with a panel of two interviewers. One will focus on your technical skills, asking you to explain your automation strategies and possibly walking through technical scenarios. The other interviewer, often a manager, will focus on behavioral questions.

Q: What makes a candidate stand out at Huntington? Candidates who can demonstrate a strong understanding of business risk stand out. Because Huntington is a financial institution, showing that you understand how to prioritize testing based on user impact and financial security will elevate your profile above candidates who only focus on writing code.

Q: Is it necessary to have prior banking experience? While prior experience in the financial sector is a strong nice-to-have, it is not strictly required. Demonstrating exceptional problem-solving skills, a rigorous approach to data validation, and a strong sense of ownership can compensate for a lack of direct banking experience.

Other General Tips

• Structure your behavioral answers: Always use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result). Huntington managers look for clear, concise communication. Ensure your "Result" highlights a positive impact on quality or team efficiency.
• Focus on the "Why": When discussing technical tools or frameworks, do not just list what you used. Explain why you chose that specific tool and how it solved a business problem or improved testing efficiency.

• Prepare for scenario mapping: You will likely be asked how you would test a specific feature. Practice breaking down a feature into positive, negative, and edge-case scenarios quickly and methodically.
• Showcase your collaborative mindset: Emphasize that you view developers as partners, not adversaries. Use language that highlights teamwork, shared goals, and a collective commitment to software quality.

Summary & Next Steps

Securing a QA Engineer role at Huntington is a fantastic opportunity to build a career at the intersection of complex financial technology and rigorous software quality. The impact of your work will be felt by millions of customers who rely on the bank's digital platforms for their daily financial needs. By focusing your preparation on practical automation skills, API testing, and collaborative problem-solving, you will position yourself as a highly capable and trustworthy candidate.

Remember that the interview process is designed to find engineers who are not just technically proficient, but who also possess the communication skills necessary to advocate for quality in a fast-paced agile environment. Review your past experiences, practice articulating your technical decisions clearly, and prepare thoughtful questions to ask your interviewers about their testing culture and team dynamics.

This module provides an overview of the compensation landscape for this role. Use this data to understand the standard salary range, keeping in mind that actual offers will vary based on your specific experience level, your performance during the interviews, and the geographic location of the position.

You have the skills and the experience to succeed in this process. Approach your interviews with confidence, be ready to share your passion for software quality, and remember that thorough preparation is your greatest advantage. For further insights and community experiences, continue exploring resources on Dataford as you finalize your interview strategy. Good luck!