MDA interview questions

Was contacted by recruiter. Sent resume and they wanted to interview me. Had an online 1 hour interview with the line manager. Questions were mostly regarding my past roles and fundamental electrical questions. Got a three year contract offer.

I recently interviewed with MDA Space (formerly SatixFy) for a Senior Software Validation Engineer position, and unfortunately, the overall experience was disappointing and unprofessional. The process began with a short initial call (around 20–40 minutes) with Will Stancer. The call felt poorly structured and lacked clarity. I was asked a few basic questions about my experience, including a very elementary question about the difference between a list and a tuple in Python. While I provided a clear explanation, there was no discussion about the expectations of the role, the required technical expertise, or even a proper overview of the position or the company. The conversation felt unprepared and did not reflect a senior-level opportunity. The following day, I was invited for an on-site interview at their Farnborough office. Upon arrival, I was taken to a meeting room where the interview was conducted by the validation lead. The this test lead took multiple phone calls during the interview and spoke in Hindi in the meeting room while I was present, without stepping out. This even occurred while reviewing my answers after the written test. This behaviour was highly unprofessional and made the interview feel disorganised and disrespectful of the candidate’s time. The technical assessment consisted of a sheet of basic, unstructured questions (not even numbered), covering very fundamental programming concepts such as: Definitions of inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation Explanation of __init__() Differences between lists, tuples, and dictionaries Mutable vs immutable types Simple examples A basic missing number puzzle While I completed all the questions, none of them were relevant to software validation, test engineering, or the responsibilities expected from a senior role. The level of questioning was far below what I would expect for this position. More concerning was the discussion about their testing practices. From my questions, I gathered that: They rely on a single server for regression testing, which takes about a month per run There appears to be no clear understanding of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing within the team There is no evident Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) regression pipeline There is no proper test management or traceability system in place For a company working in satellite communications, this lack of testing maturity and industry-standard practices was quite surprising. Overall, the interview process did not reflect a well-organised engineering team or a clear understanding of software validation at a senior level. It seemed they were primarily looking for basic Python knowledge rather than someone with experience in structured, industry-standard validation practices.