Technical Fundamentals & Core Skills Topics
Core technical concepts including algorithms, data structures, statistics, cryptography, and hardware-software integration. Covers foundational knowledge required for technical roles and advanced technical depth.
Problem Solving and Scenario Analysis
Candidates are expected to demonstrate a systematic, structured approach to analyzing and resolving technical and operational scenarios. This includes clarifying the problem statement, eliciting requirements, constraints, and assumptions, and identifying missing information or ambiguous areas. Candidates should decompose complex problems into logical components, prioritize tasks or evidence, generate solution options, and perform trade off evaluation that balances impact, feasibility, and risk. Core skills assessed include root cause analysis, incident diagnosis and forensic investigation, and evaluation of technical customer scenarios such as large scale migrations. Candidates should reason about data consistency and concurrency, security and authentication concerns, and payment and transaction flows when relevant. They should design test cases and acceptance criteria, propose instrumentation and monitoring for verification and observability, and identify opportunities for automation and operationalization. Clear communication of the recommended approach, expected outcomes, and the rationale for choices, including when to use a programming solution versus a query based approach, is essential.
Operating System Fundamentals
Comprehensive knowledge of operating system concepts and practical administration across Linux, Unix, and Windows platforms. Core theoretical topics include processes and threads, process creation and termination, scheduling and context switching, synchronization and deadlock conditions, system calls, kernel versus user space, interrupt handling, memory management including virtual memory, paging and swapping, and input and output semantics including file descriptors. Practical administration and tooling expectations include file systems and permission models, user and group account management, common system utilities and commands such as grep, find, ps, and top, package management, service and process management, startup and boot processes, environment variables, shell and scripting basics, system monitoring, and performance tuning. Platform specific knowledge should cover Unix and Linux topics such as signals and signal handling, kernel modules, initialization and service management systems, and command line administration, as well as Windows topics such as the registry, service management, event logs, user account control, and graphical and command line administration tools. Security and infrastructure topics include basic system hardening, common misconfigurations, and an understanding of containerization and virtualization at the operating system level. Interview questions may probe conceptual explanations, platform comparisons, troubleshooting scenarios, or hands on problem solving.
Problem Solving and Analytical Thinking
Evaluates a candidate's systematic and logical approach to unfamiliar, ambiguous, or complex problems across technical, product, business, security, and operational contexts. Candidates should be able to clarify objectives and constraints, ask effective clarifying questions, decompose problems into smaller components, identify root causes, form and test hypotheses, and enumerate and compare multiple solution options. Interviewers look for clear reasoning about trade offs and edge cases, avoidance of premature conclusions, use of repeatable frameworks or methodologies, prioritization of investigations, design of safe experiments and measurement of outcomes, iteration based on feedback, validation of fixes, documentation of results, and conversion of lessons learned into process improvements. Responses should clearly communicate the thought process, justify choices, surface assumptions and failure modes, and demonstrate learning from prior problem solving experiences.
File System Internals and Recovery
Comprehensive understanding of file system internals and low level storage behavior and how they affect data recovery and forensic analysis. Topics include how data is organized on storage media, common file system structures and metadata models such as inode like structures and allocation tables, allocation strategies including contiguous, linked, indexed and extent based allocation, fragmentation and its effects, and the meaning and implications of sectors, clusters, slack space and unallocated space. Candidates should be able to explain deleted file recovery and reconstruction techniques including why data can persist until overwritten, how journaling and metadata updates influence recoverability, disk imaging and signature based carving, and practical limitations introduced by encryption and space reclamation and internal garbage collection on solid state drives. Also cover distinctions between device level and file level storage, wear leveling and block remapping on flash based media, differences in mobile device storage versus traditional spinning disk storage, and how file system design decisions impact performance, reliability and recoverability. Prepare to describe practical recovery workflows, forensic acquisition considerations, and why recovery tools inspect specific areas of storage rather than deep operating system internals.