How to prepare for QA Engineer interview at Wix: 4 Essential Tips

Before walking into the interview, there are a few key things I really wish people would know. In my experience as an interviewer, I can confidently say that I always hope that you will succeed. It’s natural to have an occasional mismatch between the position and the candidate, but in most cases, you can increase your chances by simply preparing more and refreshing your knowledge before the interview. It makes the entire experience way smoother and it really helps to reduce “the interview stress”.

In this article, I’ll share a few valuable tips and resources to enhance your preparation for your interview with us.

Get to know Wix

For all of us, the company we work for matters. It matters because of different reasons (obvious one — we spend a lot of our time there), but in most of the cases we consider factors such as company values, colleagues, the products the company creates, compensation, benefits, growth, career opportunities and more.

Before your interview, it’s essential to familiarize yourself with the company you’re interviewing for, including the company’s history, values, and products:

• Know the company history: It will help you to understand why it was created in the first place and what were the biggest milestones until today. Learn about Wix’s history and key statistics.

• Know the values: By understanding company culture, you can make a call if this is the right place for you. I invite you to get to know The Wix Way:
  - We care about our people
  - We work for our users’ success
  - We build the best products in the world
  - You own what you do
  - Be a pro
  - We are transparent
  - We allow failures
  - Winning
  - We measure everything
  - Be direct
  - No assholes
  - Fun
• Know the product: even high-level product knowledge will let you have more detailed conversations during interviews, where you also can touch on the product you might work on in the future. Having domain knowledge always helps, so I encourage you to explore wix.com (you can create an account and try many of our products).

Get to know Wix Engineering

“Wix Engineering is the place to learn how to work at scale, to solve robust challenges, and to create the highest quality code. We put a great deal of focus on our engineering culture, continuous learning and personal development.”

We are passionate about sharing our knowledge and innovating. Explore our wix.engineering website, where you’ll find plenty of interesting resources, such as our engineering blog, open source products, educational programs, external meetups, podcast recordings, and much more.

Every year we release short sneak-peak video with some interesting facts about our work and facts, so I encourage you to watch it:

As example: in 2022, we became an official React Native partner. We are active in the Open source community and one of the things which might interest you as an QA Engineer is Detox — a gray box end-to-end testing and automation library for mobile apps.

Get to know the QA Guild

Companies & Guild model

Wix is organised around a “company and guild” model. You can think of each company as a small startup. Every company has its own management and a dedicated R&D team. This team fully owns the product they develop and, together, these products compound the Wix Platform. Structuring Wix this way creates an environment where every employee is part of a close-knit team while still being able to make an impact on a larger scale.

A guild is a group of engineers of the same profession. The primary purpose of guilds is to provide engineers with common technological and educational tools, promote best practices, grow professional skills, encourage knowledge sharing between companies and improve developer velocity. Every employee at Wix will allocate 20% of their working time to their guild and its activities.

QA Guild

Let’s go over the QA Guild.

“Seamlessly and efficiently remove any barriers from Wix’s growing business of making our users’ online dreams come true. Represent our users’ stories by asking tough questions, keeping a cross-companies perspective, using state of the art testing methodologies, tools and user data analysis.”

At Wix, the entire team takes ownership and responsibility around the quality of the product. This approach broadens testing abilities and allows the team to work collaboratively to identify and address issues. It’s one of the reasons why we keep a relatively small number of QA engineers within the team (1 QA to approx. 10 developers (frontend, backend, and mobile)). We make our decisions based on data (production monitoring, user voice, analytics, etc.), avoid repetitive tasks, and continuously look at ways to increase team velocity. The QA role at Wix focuses on advocating for quality rather than assuring it. Wix QA Engineers are those who:

• Deeply care about building and creating a culture of quality inside the team
• Continuously seek team process improvements and innovations that empower our developers to confidently push code to production
• Know the product the best and strive to implement the newest methodologies and most efficient testing strategies within the team
• Strive to remove bottlenecks from the system rather than just providing a safety net to catch failures
• Get things done and seek additional help when needed
• Coach and educate the team to continually improve quality.

Testing in Production

At Wix, we follow continuous delivery practices: automatic processes, fast and efficient test automation, version control, and more. It allows us to react and deploy fast (we have frequent releases and update our production, on average, every 1.5 minutes). We make sure our production is working well by having a very close connection to our users (support, emails, calls, forums, user’s live sessions, etc.) while monitoring thousands of metrics across all teams. By understanding our users needs and priorities, we can adapt our requirements, scope or features accordingly.

Tech Stack

Our QA Engineers heavily work with automation tools. Familiarity with our technologies and some of the open-source tools we created, might give you additional ‘points’ during technical interviews (of course you need to understand the things you are talking about). We have a few automation frameworks and we are deciding per case, which automation framework will work best for specific products or teams. Here you can take a sneak peek at our main frameworks, tools and languages we are using.

We are collaborating on automation efforts together with developers. At Wix, we are following TDD practices and from the QA side we are focusing on integration (with other teams) and E2E tests. We value short & fast automation tests and by parallelizing it in the cloud services we can run millions of E2E tests efficiently. Want to know more about it? Check out our post about it here.

Know your strengths and refresh your knowledge

We’ve now reached the most important part of the preparation — focusing on you. Take the time to review your resume — refresh your memory on current and past projects, lessons learned, major achievements, and skills relevant to the position you are applying for. Try to identify specific examples from your background that are relevant to the job requirements and role responsibilities. Be ready to discuss these during the interview.

“Wix is a very people-centric company. We value the fact that each of us has their own route, and we want to encourage it. The way we hire reflects that: for us, the mission is to always keep an open mind and look at each hiring process in a broad way, without fixating on a checklist.”

The way we hire reflects this philosophy: our goal is to always remain open and try to understand your strengths rather than ‘going over the checklist’. We believe that smart people learn constantly, and that’s why your knowledge, motivation and experience matter more than a specific degree. Thanks to the diverse backgrounds of our team members, we are creating amazing products and bringing innovative solutions to millions of users.

We also test people (in fact, everyone). In the Wix QA Guild, the hiring process usually looks like the following:

• 1st stage — technical interview with QA engineers
• 2nd stage — technical interview with guild manager
• 3rd stage — interview with HR
• 4th stage — interview with the Team

We enjoy challenging each other to learn about different approaches, so during technical interviews you will be invited for an open discussion on topics like: QA strategy, testing methodologies, web knowledge, debugging, user experience, tools you are familiar with, continuous delivery principles, and more. At Wix, we care about growth a lot (remember, we allocate 20% of ours for guild activities and learning) so we’ll be interested in how you keep your engineering skills and knowledge up-to-date.

We will also explore some of Wix products where we will be able to have more technical discussions. Refreshing web and API knowledge before the technical interview could be very beneficial. If you’re applying for an automation position, you can expect that we will ask you to code some simple algorithms on the spot (there are plenty of platforms where you can practice). You might get some questions and tasks around automation best practices and design patterns, as well. As a QA engineer, you can discuss many things related to software development, so be sure to share your knowledge. Take into account that there’s no one right answer… We’re not only evaluating technical skills, but also your ability to think creatively, adapt solutions and find ways to solve problems.

The End

I really hope that this article has provided you with a better understanding of Wix, our values, and our approach to the hiring process. I also hope that it gives you some insights on how you can prepare more effectively (and maybe not only for Wix interview). Recognize your strengths and refresh your knowledge. Preparation is the key, so feel free to share with us any interesting aspects you’ve discovered about our platform or the way we work. Ask your questions and bring your topics for discussions.

Good luck with your interview!