Evaluate infrastructure skills: CI/CD, containers, monitoring, and incident response.
Evaluates experience designing and maintaining continuous integration and deployment pipelines.
Candidate describes pipelines with build, test, security scanning, and deployment stages. They discuss blue-green or canary deployments, rollback strategies, and environment promotion patterns.
Candidate has only used basic push-to-deploy setups, cannot explain how to roll back a bad deployment, or has no strategy for environment management.
Assesses knowledge of containerization concepts and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
Candidate discusses multi-stage builds, minimal base images, resource limits, health checks, and liveness/readiness probes. They understand pod scheduling, horizontal autoscaling, and service mesh concepts.
Candidate runs everything as root in containers, doesn't understand namespaces or resource limits, or cannot explain basic Kubernetes concepts despite claiming experience.
Evaluates the candidate's approach to building observable systems and meaningful alerting.
Candidate references the four golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) or RED/USE methods. They discuss SLOs/SLIs, alert fatigue prevention, and correlating metrics with logs and traces.
Candidate monitors only CPU and memory, has no alerting strategy, or cannot explain the difference between monitoring, logging, and tracing.
Assesses experience with production incidents, on-call responsibilities, and post-incident processes.
Candidate describes a structured incident response process: triage, communicate, mitigate, root cause, postmortem. They emphasize blameless culture and action items that prevent recurrence.
Candidate has never been on-call, views incidents as someone else's problem, or focuses only on blame rather than systemic improvement.
Evaluates experience with IaC tools, automation patterns, and managing infrastructure at scale.
Candidate has hands-on experience with Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation. They discuss state management, module design, code review for infra changes, and drift detection strategies.
Candidate makes infrastructure changes manually via cloud consoles, doesn't version control infrastructure, or has only used IaC for trivial setups.
Interview notes go here...
Design and manage cloud infrastructure for scalability, cost efficiency, and security.
Automate infrastructure, streamline CI/CD pipelines, and improve deployment reliability.
Ensure system reliability and uptime through engineering-driven operations and automation.