March 16, 2026
What I Actually Look For When I Interview QA Engineers (And How You Can Prepare)
I’ve conducted more QA technical interviews in my career than I can count - from junior candidates fresh out of bootcamp to seasoned seniors with a decade of experience. And I keep seeing the same gaps, the same missed opportunities, and the same surprises when candidates nail it.
The QA job market has shifted. If you’re preparing for interviews right now, the playbook from 2 or 3 years ago won’t cut it. Let’s talk about what’s actually going on, what skills matter, and how to walk into your next interview with confidence.
The QA market isn’t what it used to be
The harsh truth is that the job market for QA has gotten tighter. Layoffs hit testing teams hard, and many companies consolidated QA roles or shifted testing responsibilities onto developers. Some teams eliminated dedicated QA positions entirely.
But here’s the thing - that doesn’t mean QA is dead. It means the bar has gone up. Companies that do hire QA engineers now expect much more of them. They want people who can automate, who understand architecture, who can talk about risk and strategy - not just someone who follows test scripts.
If you’re looking for a QA role right now, you’re competing with experienced engineers who were recently laid off. Companies that are hiring know they need quality expertise. They’re not posting QA roles as an afterthought - they’re posting them because they’ve felt the pain of not having dedicated quality people.
The skills that actually move the needle
Whenever I’m sitting across the table from a candidate (well, across a video call), here’s what separates the people that have a chance in this market from those who might struggle.
In my last article The 3 Skills Gaps That Tank QA Automation Interviews I covered the fundamentals: JavaScript/TypeScript fluency, API testing depth, and the “why” behind your tooling choices. If you haven’t read it, start there. What I want to focus on here are the skills I didn’t cover last time - the ones that round out the picture.
CI/CD fluency
If you can’t talk about how your tests fit into a pipeline, that’s a red flag. You don’t need to be a DevOps expert (although it feels like a natural step towards growth in QA roles for me), but you should understand how tests get triggered, how to interpret pipeline failures, and what it means to maintain a reliable test suite in CI. Flaky tests that block deployments are a real problem, and I want to know you’ve dealt with that. Oftentimes I hear candidates state “oh, DevOps was doing that”. Time to change that narrative.
Testing strategy, not just test cases
Junior candidates often think in terms of individual test cases. That’s fine for junior roles. But once you’re at mid-level or above, I need to hear you think about risk. Where do bugs actually hurt the business? What do you test first? What do you skip, and why?
The best candidates I’ve interviewed can walk me through how they’d approach testing a feature they’ve never seen before. They ask questions. They think about edge cases not because they memorized a checklist, but because they understand the system well enough to know where it might break.
Communication skills
This one surprises people, but it’s not optional. QA engineers are the bridge between “it works on my machine” and “it works for the customer”. You need to write clear bug reports, explain risk to non-technical stakeholders, and push back on deadlines when quality is at stake - all of that diplomatically. In an interview, I’m watching how clearly you explain your thought process, not just whether you get the “right” answer. Heck, the way I build the interviews makes it so that the response shows your depth of knowledge, not keyword matching or if the answer is good or bad.
How to actually prepare
Beyond the fundamentals I covered in my previous post, here’s what else you should be doing.
Build something, don’t just study
The single most effective thing you can do is set up a test automation project from scratch. Pick a public website or API (there are plenty of practice ones out there), write a small framework, get it running on GitHub Actions, and push it to a public repo. When I see a candidate’s GitHub (and I often look for it if it’s not provided) with a well-structured test project, it tells me more than any certification on their resume ever could.
Use AI, but understand the basics
We live in AI-driven times. Despite what some think, the bubble won’t just burst and disappear - it has its spot in the SDLC right now and as engineers we should learn to utilize it in ways that will support us, not replace us. Many times candidates during live coding, when Copilot gets disabled with inline suggestions, struggle with basics - .filter(), .sort(), .map(), .reduce() in JS for array methods, TypeScript’s interfaces and types (not even generic ones).
I covered this in more depth in the previous article, but it bears repeating: muscle memory with fundamentals matters. AI is your co-pilot (pun intended), not your pilot.
Practice talking about trade-offs
Interview questions increasingly sound like “how would you approach testing X?” rather than “what is boundary value analysis?” so prepare by practicing out loud. Pick a feature from an app you use daily and talk through how you’d test it. Where would you automate? Where would you stick with manual testing? What risks would you flag? If you can’t explain your testing decisions clearly to yourself or a friend over coffee, you’re not ready to explain them in an interview.
Know your testing models - and when to break them
Glad you know your testing types - unit, integration, e2e, regression, smoke, etc. But be ready to talk about when each one is appropriate and how they complement each other. The testing pyramid isn’t just a diagram for a textbook. It’s a practical tool for deciding where to invest effort, but there’s a time and place to do it by the book or flip the pyramid on some projects - or scramble it all together into what I call a “testing square”.
A note on levels
I interview candidates at different levels, and my expectations scale accordingly.
For junior roles, I want curiosity and fundamentals. Show me you understand what testing is for, that you can write a basic automated test, and that you’re eager to learn. You don’t need to know everything but you need to convince me you’ll figure it out. QA roles span across multiple areas - databases, CI/CD, mobile testing, web app testing, API testing, performance testing - learn basics in all areas to feel confident you can learn further if needed.
For mid-level roles, I want independence and judgment. You should be able to own a feature’s test strategy, automate confidently, and communicate well with developers and stakeholders. I’ll push you on trade-offs and expect you to have opinions.
For senior roles, I want leadership and vision. How do you improve a team’s testing practices? How do you mentor other QA engineers? How do you decide what not to test? At this level, the conversation is less about tools and more about impact, but the fundamentals are still a requirement.
The bottom line
The QA job market is competitive like it never was, but it rewards people who’ve genuinely invested in their craft. If you understand testing strategy beyond test cases, if you can build and maintain automation that actually helps your team ship faster, and if you can communicate clearly about quality - you’re going to stand out.
And if you’re about to walk into an interview with a Lead QA on the other side of the (virtual) table you now know what we’re actually looking for.
Good luck out there!