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.
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.
Technical Stack and Infrastructure
Addresses the technology stack and platform infrastructure choices that support a product. Topics include cloud architecture, deployment platforms, service and data layer design, observability and monitoring, scalability and performance considerations, tooling for build and release, and assessing technical debt or modernization needs in the stack. Also covers evaluation of BI tools, ETL platforms, and how infrastructure choices affect team velocity and operational cost.
Cloud Cost Modeling and Planning
Building and evaluating cost models for cloud adoption and migration, including estimating total cost of ownership, comparing on premise and cloud deployment costs, and developing business cases for cloud investments. Skills include mapping workload characteristics to cloud pricing models, forecasting usage and growth, accounting for licensing and migration one time costs, modeling ongoing operational costs, and incorporating discounts such as reserved capacity and spot pricing. Also covers scenario and sensitivity analysis, capacity planning and rightsizing, cost governance practices such as tagging and showback or chargeback, measuring financial outcomes and return on investment, and strategies for post migration cost optimization and financial monitoring.