Interview Tips for Pega Experienced Engineers

Getting ready for a Pega interview is challenging, especially for experienced engineers. With a unique blend of technical knowledge and practical experience, you can set yourself apart from other candidates. Here are some of the tips.

1. Mastering Pega Fundamentals

Whether you have 3 years experience or 15 years experience in Pega, understanding the core concepts of Pega is crucial. Below are some tips

• Introduction: First introduce your self with a simple summary

  1. Your current role , list 2 or 3 important responsibilities

  2. What is the current domain you work for and the domains (financial services, banking, insurance etc) you have experience with.

  3. What versions of Pega you worked and what Pega frameworks you are familiar.

  Just a small 1-2 minute summary. Don't pour more details which may attract more questions.

• Familiar with business: Usually the first question you get in any interview after your introduction is what was the recent project you worked on and explain the case flow and the application.

  Discuss how you’ve designed the flows for your application/s, detailing how you efficiently it was designed. Have clear cut information on the business functions your application supports.

• Sharing Project Experience

  Be prepared to delve into specific projects:

  • Role and Challenges: Highlight your role in significant projects and the challenges you encountered.

  • Customizations: Discuss any complex customizations you’ve implemented. Perhaps you created a custom UI component that improved user experience significantly or any custom code you have to build to implement a solution.

• Case Management: Be ready to talk about how you managed different case types in your projects. For instance, if you implemented a case management solution for a loan application, share the challenges and successes.

• Know the Rules: Rules are the backbone of Pega applications. Understand the real time usage of the rule by going through the Pega Academy or Pega Help or Online resources including youtube is essential. Especially the important rule types that you use regularly. For example, Data model(properties and types, data pages, data tables), class structure (types of classes, difference between class group, work class, and table mapping with classes), report types etc. Be prepared to explain its purpose and the process of creating and configuring for various purposes.

2. Familiarity with Pega Tools

Being well-versed in Pega’s development tools is essential.

• Development Studio: Tour all the blocks of the development studio including

  1. The application explorer, rules explorer, data explorer.

  2. Configuration menu, each and every function in all the categories. Importantly process, integration, system.

  3. Debugging tools, performance tools.

  4. Upgrade tools, refactoring wizards (rename class, copy/merge ruleset/s versions) etc

• App Studio: Go through all the functions of App Studio, particularly to know how a citizen developer can build application with low code and configuration (case types, views, data model, data pages) etc. How you’ve used it to streamline application development or enhance user interfaces.

• Admin Studio: Be familiar with functions of admin studio. It is very important when you show case your debugging skills. Familiar with debugging or tracing the requestor sessions , mashup user sessions, background processes, queue processors etc.

3. Understanding the Pega Lifecycle

A clear grasp of the application development lifecycle in Pega is important.

• Design: Either you designed your application or if you work on already designed application, make sure you go through the design of it and understand it properly. If you don't know ask your leads to gather more information after you do required research.

  1. Application Enterprise class structure(ECS)

  2. Data model, channels implemented, personas or users

  3. Enterprise data lake (ETL CRUD), downstream and upstream systems where the data is stored (Pega data, customer data, reports data) and where data is exported or retrieved from.

• Build: Be prepared to explain couple of recent complex implementations, design ,any challenges you faced during the build phase and how did you resolve the challenges.

• Testing and Deployment: Talk about your testing strategies. For instance, you might have used automated testing to ensure that all business rules were functioning correctly before deployment.

4. Rule Management Expertise

Know below concepts and be prepared to answer for any question.

• Rule Sets and Versions

• Branch development

• Building reusable rules

• Inheritance

• Maintaining the good compliance score

5. Integration Knowledge

Integration is a key aspect of Pega applications.

• Connectors and Services: Be ready to discuss your experience with REST and SOAP integrations. For instance, you might have implemented a REST connector to fetch customer data from an external CRM system.

• Integration Patterns: Familiarize yourself with different integration patterns, such as request/reply or publish/subscribe. Share an example where you employed a specific pattern to enhance application performance.

• Securing the connector and service: Get to know all the techniques to secure the connectors and the services. How to implement authentication and authorization for the integration components. How data implement data security in transit (TLS/SSL).

• Securing the pega application and the work: Authentication, Authorization, SSO, LDAP, Access roles, Access groups, access when, access deny, RBAC, ABAC, security policies etc.

6. Best Practices

Share your insights on Pega best practices:

• Design Patterns: Talk about design patterns you’ve used to create scalable applications.

• Performance Optimization: Describe strategies you implemented to enhance application performance, such as optimizing data retrieval processes using techniques like queuing, defer load or demand loading etc.

• Learn concepts in such a way to explain them when the interviewer asked the scenario based questions.

7. Problem-Solving Skills

Be ready for scenario-based questions that test your problem-solving abilities.

• Troubleshooting: Prepare a specific example where you diagnosed and fixed a performance issue in a live application.

• Optimization: Share a time when you had to optimize a slow-running process, detailing the steps you took to achieve better performance.

8. Behavioral Questions

Expect questions about your soft skills:

• Collaboration: Discuss how you work within teams. For instance, share an example where you helped resolve a conflict between team members during a project.

• Adaptability: Provide instances where you had to adapt quickly to changes. Perhaps you switched from one team to another mid-project and how you managed that transition.

9. Preparation Strategies

Consider these preparation strategies:

• Mock Interviews: Conduct mock interviews with colleagues to practice both technical and behavioral questions. This can help you refine your responses and boost your confidence.

• Review Documentation: Stay updated on the latest Pega documentation and release notes to understand new features and enhancements.

10. Highlight Certifications

If you have relevant Pega certifications, be prepared to discuss them. Explain how these certifications have contributed to your skills and knowledge, and how you’ve applied what you learned in real projects.

11. Engage with Questions

Prepare thoughtful questions for the interviewer:

• Company Use of Pega: Ask about how the company utilizes Pega in its operations, which shows your interest in their projects.

• Professional Development: Inquire about opportunities for continued education and growth in Pega technologies within the company.

  
  

Have clean resume: Do not put the things that you don't know. While interviewing most of the times interviewer looks at your resume and cook the questions based on the concepts or projects you kept.

Be professional, straight to the point, be calm, have the discussion naturally and friendly way.

Note for the Interviewers: Please do not expect 100% perfection and answers for all the questions. It is fine if he/she gives 60%-70% of the questions answered. The performance of the candidate depends on various factors, though the candidate has experience sometimes he/she may not able to answer properly for some of the questions that doesn't mean that they don't know. Just understand whether he/she can learn and adopt the things easily or not. And give them a chance.

Show empathy in these bad market conditions, support each other and give them an opportunity.

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