The entire interview process started in first week of May with the HR contacting me directly. I don't remember where/how i applied but i believe i found an opening on indeed and applied directly with the company.
First, here is a little background about myself. I have about 7 years of total experience in DW/BI and most of it has been on Informatica Power Center client.
After the initial background discussion with the HR, she said i will have 2 technical interviews. The interviews were scheduled and re-scheduled multiple times. I understand that most of the folks who conduct interviews are busy with their assignments, but so am i or any other candidate so i was a little disappointed with so many re-scheduled interviews.
Anyways, the first 2 were pure technical interviews. You can't pretend to know something or prepare for the interviews. Unless you have hands on experience you can't answer. Few of the questions are as below
1) Informatica 7x, 8x, 9x architecture, (need to explain about SOA etc)
2) Can you install multiple instances of powercenter on same host? if you can, then how will you invoke different instances from a client since you provide same host name? configuring different ports is not the right answer.
3) Can you invoke a mapplet variable from a worklet? and vice-versa? Can you use a mapping variable inside a mapplet? and all such combinations!
4) different types of partitions. In depth usage of each partitions and different scenarios(need to provide examples where you have used them in your project, not just the concepts)
5) dynamic cache, and dynamic partitioning questions
6) Configuring grid on informatica server, configuring domains, pmrep command usage etc.
I am not gonna get into more details, basically they are gonna ask everything and anything! These guys know the product in and out, so be prepared for anything! They were very keen on my knowledge of Powerconnect for Tibco/SAP etc but i had never used them in a project even though i had working knowledge.
They absolutely didn't care about my knowledge in UNIX, shell/perl scripting, DW/BI knowledge, Meta data management or data modeling. All they were interested was Informatica products experience.
Anyways, I did clear both the technical interviews. I had 3 other interviews with 2 VP's and a Regional Manager. Again, all these interviews were re-scheduled multiple times dragging the whole interview process to over 3 months. The VP's and regional managers were more interested in my consulting background and softskills and just a high level understanding of my informatica knowledge.
I did clear all the interviews. The final interview was with a VP face to face in their NY office.
