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Systems and Infrastructure Experience Questions

Describe and analyze your hands on experience designing, operating, and maintaining infrastructure and systems. Candidates should be prepared with three to four concrete examples of systems or infrastructure projects they directly contributed to, including quantitative scale metrics such as user counts, requests per second, data volumes, throughput, and geographic distribution. Discuss architecture decisions and trade offs, component choices, platform boundaries, and how the design met requirements for scalability, reliability, performance, and security. Cover operational aspects such as deployments, configuration management, automation and infrastructure as code, monitoring and observability, incident response and remediation, capacity planning, and disaster recovery and business continuity. Include experience with large scale and multi region deployments, data center operations, networking at scale, and integration points. Also cover enterprise information technology topics where relevant, for example servers and endpoints, storage systems, networking hardware, identity and access infrastructure such as Active Directory, firewalls, routers and switches, and the differences and migration considerations between on premise and cloud infrastructure. Be ready to explain specific challenges faced, how issues were diagnosed and resolved, trade offs made, and the candidate's exact role and contributions.

HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design a global certificate lifecycle management system that handles issuance, automated rotation, revocation, and emergency revocation for thousands of services across regions. Include CA selection, automation integration with deployment pipelines, monitoring for expiry, and audit trails.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe a production-grade Kubernetes cluster architecture: control plane topology, etcd sizing and backup strategy, worker node sizing, CNI choices, storage via CSI, ingress controller patterns, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler tuning, and considerations for performing safe cluster upgrades.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You inherit a large, decayed Terraform codebase with significant drift from manual changes. Present a step-by-step plan to refactor into modules, enforce policies (e.g., Sentinel, OPA), detect drift, and perform safe migrations. Include a rollback strategy and how to coordinate the team to avoid further manual changes during refactor.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Tell me about a time you automated a manual operational task (e.g., CI/CD step, backups, runbook, database vacuum). Describe the problem, the automation you implemented, the tools used, and the measurable impact on MTTR, cost, or engineer time saved.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Your company has a single-region core service and plans to expand to multi-region. Describe a migration strategy that includes data replication choices (async vs sync), DNS cutover, schema considerations, user session routing, and rollback plan for each phase of the migration.

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