Cloud & Infrastructure Topics
Cloud platform services, infrastructure architecture, Infrastructure as Code, environment provisioning, and infrastructure operations. Covers cloud service selection, infrastructure provisioning patterns, container orchestration (Kubernetes), multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, infrastructure cost optimization, and cloud platform operations. For CI/CD pipeline and deployment automation, see DevOps & Release Engineering. For cloud security implementation, see Security Engineering & Operations. For data infrastructure design, see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure.
Hardware Troubleshooting and Diagnostics
Skills and processes for detecting, diagnosing, and remediating hardware faults across servers, storage, network interface cards, and peripherals. Topics include recognizing common failure modes for CPU, memory, disk, and NICs; using firmware and BIOS UEFI settings and diagnostics; interpreting hardware monitoring outputs and sensor data; running vendor diagnostic utilities and benchmarks; using SMART and storage diagnostics; distinguishing hardware from software issues; safe escalation and vendor engagement procedures; and planning replacements and mitigations to avoid data loss or downtime. Emphasis is on methodical data collection, reproducible tests, and appropriate escalation.
Containerization and Virtualization Trade Offs
Examines trade offs between containers and virtual machines and the complexity of orchestrated environments. Topics include hypervisor and virtual machine basics, container isolation and resource models, performance and overhead comparisons, security and attack surface differences, when to prefer virtual machines versus containers, single container versus orchestrated multi container setups, operational complexity versus benefits, and criteria for selecting the appropriate platform at different scales.
Networking Configuration and Troubleshooting
Covers practical networking configuration and diagnostic skills needed to build and operate reliable networks. Topics include IP addressing and subnetting, VLANs and layer two concepts, routing and route selection, switching, DNS and DHCP configuration, firewall and access control rules, network address translation, load balancing basics, virtual and overlay network technologies, packet capture and tracing methodologies, and structured troubleshooting approaches used in lab or production environments. Interviewers will probe the candidate's ability to isolate issues, validate configurations, and apply safe changes.
System Administration Tools and Monitoring
Knowledge of monitoring, logging, and operational tooling used to observe and manage infrastructure. Includes monitoring platforms such as Nagios, Zabbix, and Prometheus; log aggregation and search with ELK Stack or similar; metrics collection, time series databases, alerting rules, dashboards and visualization, instrumenting systems and services for observability, common system utilities such as top, iostat, sar, and vmstat, integration with incident management and ticketing systems, and determining which metrics matter for capacity and performance monitoring.
Observability and Monitoring Architecture
Designing and architecting end to end observability and monitoring systems that scale, remain reliable under load, and do not become single points of failure. Topics include deciding which telemetry to collect and why including metrics logs traces and events, instrumentation strategies, collection models such as push versus pull, high throughput telemetry ingestion and pipeline design, time series storage and compression, aggregation and partitioning strategies, metric cardinality and retention tradeoffs, distributed tracing propagation and sampling strategies, log aggregation and secure storage, selection of storage backends and time series databases, storage tiering and cost optimization, query and dashboard performance considerations, access control and multi tenancy, integration with deployment pipelines and tooling, and design patterns for self healing telemetry pipelines. Senior level assessments include designing scalable ingestion and aggregation architectures, storage tiering and query performance optimization, cost and operational tradeoffs, and organizational impacts of observability data.
Virtual Machine and Hypervisor Management
This topic covers management of virtual machines and the underlying hypervisor infrastructure. Topics include creating and configuring virtual machines with appropriate CPU memory and storage allocation, virtual networking and host networking considerations, host resource management and overcommit behavior, snapshot and checkpoint usage and limitations, live migration and high availability of virtual hosts, backup and restore strategies for virtual machines, performance troubleshooting and tuning, resource scheduling and placement, and capacity planning for virtualized clusters. Candidates should be able to compare hypervisor platforms and explain trade offs when selecting a virtualization approach versus alternative technologies.
Active Directory Architecture and Management
Comprehensive coverage of Microsoft Active Directory and directory services design, deployment, operation, and troubleshooting. Topics include the logical and physical structure of Active Directory such as forests, trees, domains, organizational units, naming contexts, domain controllers, global catalog servers, and site topology. Candidates should understand directory data models and object types and attributes, including user accounts, computer accounts, security groups and distribution groups, group scopes and nesting, membership management, and access control lists and permission models on directory objects. Expect questions on authentication and authorization flows including Kerberos based authentication, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol binds and queries, domain joining, trust relationships between domains and forests, and the impact of domain controller roles including flexible single master operation roles and read only domain controllers. Coverage also includes replication topology and behavior, site awareness and site link design, replication scheduling and conflict resolution, and techniques for troubleshooting replication and connectivity issues. Candidates should be able to explain group policy concepts for centralized configuration and security enforcement, delegation and administrative models, common management consoles and automation and scripting for administration, backup and recovery considerations, and how to design Active Directory deployments for scale, resilience, and integration with broader identity and access management and single sign on solutions.
Operating System Administration
Covers practical administration of major operating systems, principally Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows Server. Topics include installation and patching strategies, package and service management, user and permission management, file system and storage administration, process and resource management, service supervision, logging and monitoring, boot and init systems, automation using shell scripts or configuration management tooling, troubleshooting common OS level failures, and integration with directory and authentication services. Interviewers evaluate hands on skills, tooling choices, and the ability to diagnose and resolve operating system issues.
Technical Vision and Infrastructure Roadmap
This topic assesses a candidate's ability to define a multi year technical vision for infrastructure, platform, and systems and to translate that vision into a practical execution roadmap. Core skills include evaluating technology choices and architecture evolution, planning migration and modernization paths, anticipating scalability and capacity needs, and balancing cost performance with resilience and operational reliability. Candidates should demonstrate approaches to managing technical debt, sequencing investments across quarters and releases, estimating resources and timelines, establishing measurable infrastructure goals and key performance indicators, and implementing governance and standards. Discussion may also cover reliability and observability, security and compliance considerations, trade offs between short term stability and long term rearchitecture, prioritization to enable business outcomes, and communicating technical trade offs to both technical and non technical stakeholders.