Welcoming questions
- Can you tell us about your background and the infrastructure environments you have worked in?
- What drew you to systems work rather than application development?
Role-specific / technical competencies
- Describe an environment you automated with tools like Ansible or Terraform. What did it look like before and after?
- How do you approach capacity planning for compute and storage? What signals do you watch?
- Walk us through your patching strategy for a fleet of production servers with uptime requirements.
- How do you design monitoring for a new service? Which metrics and alerts do you set up first?
- Tell us about the most complex infrastructure problem you have debugged across multiple layers. How did you isolate the cause?
Behavioural & culture fit
- Tell us about a change you made that caused an outage. How did you handle it and what changed afterwards?
- How do you document your work so a colleague can operate systems you built?
- Describe a time you disagreed with a proposed architecture. How did you make your case?
Problem-solving / case
- A critical application slows down every day around 2 p.m., but CPU and memory look normal. How do you investigate?
- You must migrate 40 virtual machines to a new platform with a maximum of one hour of downtime. Outline your plan.
- A restore test reveals your backups for one database server have been silently failing for a month. What do you do, in what order?
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