Interview Experience – DeShaw (Testing Automation / QA Role)

I got the interview opportunity through a recruiter who reached out to me via Naukri for a Testing Automation / QA role. Since it was the start of my interview journey, I agreed to proceed. The initial discussion focused on my current role and responsibilities. The interviewer then asked if I was sure about the interview for this role, noting it was a testing/QA position and not a development role. There was concern about role fit, as the interviewer felt my experience leaned more toward development and questioned if this interview was appropriate for the role. I was then asked a LeetCode Hard problem during the interview, which was conducted on HackerRank: LeetCode 224 – Basic Calculator. I was also given a real-world debugging scenario: a system that was working correctly earlier is now failing during file upload. Follow-up questions included possible causes, how to identify the root cause, and tools/logs to use for tracing the issue. A logic-based puzzle was asked toward the end. I was not able to solve the coding problem during the interview. Later, the recruiter shared feedback stating that I was not suitable for this particular QA role.