Expect questions that test both your coding ability and your strategy for delivering quality at scale. Prepare concise, example-backed answers, and be ready to whiteboard frameworks, sketch pipelines, or step through traces.

Automation & Tools (Playwright, Cypress)

You’ll be asked to design and code while explaining maintainability choices.

• How would you structure a Playwright/TypeScript framework for cross-team reuse?
• Show how you would mock network calls and stabilize flaky waits.
• What’s your approach to test data management across parallel runs?
• Compare Cypress and Playwright for your last project—why choose one over the other?
• Walk through a tough automation bug you solved and how you prevented regressions.

API/Backend Testing

Demonstrate depth in auth, contracts, negative testing, and CI strategy.

• How do you handle OAuth2 flows and token lifecycle in CI?
• Design contract tests to protect a consumer when a provider adds fields.
• What belongs in smoke vs. regression for API coverage?
• How do you test idempotency and error handling (timeouts, retries)?
• Explain your mocking/service virtualization approach.

CI/CD, Reliability, and Observability

Show how you operationalize quality and metrics.

• Outline a GitHub Actions pipeline that shards UI tests and publishes videos/traces.
• Which metrics do you track to detect and reduce flake?
• How do you quarantine tests without masking product defects?
• Describe test impact analysis and how you’d implement it.
• What would your release readiness dashboard include?

Telecom/Real-Time Systems (NG911)

For NG911 candidates, expect protocol and diagnostics questions.

• Explain a SIP INVITE–200 OK–ACK call flow and common failure points.
• How would you detect and diagnose one-way audio?
• What tools and filters do you use in Wireshark to isolate RTP issues?
• How do you automate validation of failover scenarios?
• What’s your experience with WebRTC ICE and TURN servers?

Strategy, Leadership, and Behavior

Demonstrate ownership, influence, and pragmatic judgment.

• Describe how you set QA standards and gained adoption.
• Tell me about a time you used metrics to reverse a go decision—or proceed with caution.
• How do you mentor juniors on writing maintainable tests?
• Share a conflict with Product/Engineering about scope—how did you resolve it?
• What is your 90-day plan to improve quality on a new program?

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Test Automation & Framework Design

Quality at Atos is engineered, not inspected. You will be assessed on how you design scalable, maintainable test frameworks and enforce standards through patterns, tooling, and CI/CD integration.

Be ready to go over:

• Playwright with TypeScript: Fixtures, selectors, parallelism, retries, network mocking, tracing, and handling test data at scale.
• Cypress fundamentals: Command queue, intercepts, custom commands, component testing, and managing flakiness.
• Architecture & patterns: Page Object/Screenplay patterns, layered architecture, test data builders, dependency injection, and modular utilities.
• Advanced concepts (less common): Visual testing strategies, model-based testing, contract testing with Pact, mutation testing, property-based testing.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a Playwright test framework structure for a multi-repo monorepo; justify fixtures and parallelization."
• "How would you stabilize a flaky test intermittently failing due to async UI updates and network variability?"
• "Show a TypeScript example for login with API pre-auth and state reuse across test files."

API and Microservices Testing

Robust back-end validation underpins reliable releases. You will be assessed on RESTful/GraphQL testing, auth flows, and test data strategies aligned to microservice architectures.

Be ready to go over:

• API tooling: Playwright API, Postman/Newman, REST Assured (concepts), request signing, and auth (OAuth2, JWT).
• Resilience: Idempotency, retries/backoff, circuit breakers (how to test), and negative/edge-paths.
• Data & mocks: Service virtualization, contract testing, schema validation, and environment management.
• Advanced concepts (less common): Synthetic data generation, CDC pipelines for test data, API performance smoke in CI.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design API tests for an endpoint with OAuth2 client credentials; where do you manage tokens?"
• "How do you structure contract tests to protect consumers when a provider changes?"
• "What belongs in CI vs. nightly for API suites and why?"

CI/CD, Reliability Gates, and DevOps Integration

You’ll be evaluated on how well you operationalize quality—from GitHub Actions/Jenkins pipelines to artifact promotion and release health dashboards.

Be ready to go over:

• Pipelines: Job orchestration, parallelization, caching, test shards, and matrix builds across browsers/OS.
• Quality gates: Fail-fast smoke, flaky quarantine policies, code coverage thresholds, and performance/error budgets.
• Observability: Test analytics, trend dashboards, and integrating logs/traces/screenshots/videos for triage.
• Advanced concepts (less common): Ephemeral environments with Docker/K8s, blue-green canary validation, test impact analysis.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Sketch a CI pipeline that runs Playwright UI and API suites in parallel with artifacts and retries."
• "How would you surface test flakiness trends and hold teams accountable for resolution?"
• "Describe your approach to test impact analysis on PRs."

Telecom/Real-Time Systems (NG911) & Diagnostics

For NG911 and real-time programs, you’ll be assessed on VoIP signaling expertise and low-latency troubleshooting under production-like conditions.

Be ready to go over:

• SIP/WebRTC: Call flows, SDP negotiation, ICE/STUN/TURN, and common failure signatures.
• Packet analysis: Using Wireshark and PCAPs to isolate signaling vs. RTP issues (jitter, packet loss, codec).
• Systems: Linux/Windows, virtualization (VMware), service health, and deployment testing.
• Advanced concepts (less common): QoS policies, media encryption (SRTP), clock sync and timing drift effects.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk through diagnosing one-way audio using SIP traces and RTP stats."
• "Design an automated validation suite for multiple NG911 call flows with failover."
• "What metrics would you track to assure call quality under load?"

Quality Strategy, Metrics, and Leadership

You’ll be evaluated on how you influence quality outcomes beyond test writing—through strategy, standards, and measurable improvements.

Be ready to go over:

• Strategy: Where to invest automation vs. exploratory, risk-based testing, and release readiness criteria.
• Metrics: Flake rate, MTTR for test failures, change failure rate, coverage (use responsibly), and defect escape rate.
• Enablement: Code reviews, pairing, mentoring, and driving adoption of standards across teams.
• Advanced concepts (less common): AI-assisted testing (Copilot/GenAI), self-healing locators, intelligent test generation.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "You inherit a failing test suite blocking releases—how do you recover confidence in two sprints?"
• "Which three metrics do you report at release go/no-go and why?"
• "Show how you mentored a team to reduce flake by 50%."