DevOps & Release Engineering Topics
CI/CD pipeline design, build automation, deployment strategies, release management, artifact repositories, version control integration, and continuous delivery practices. Covers infrastructure automation for delivery workflows, release gates and approvals, multi-service orchestration, rollback strategies, and GitOps approaches. Distinct from Cloud & Infrastructure by focusing specifically on delivery automation and release processes rather than infrastructure platforms.
Release Engineering and Change Management
Design and operate deployment and release processes that minimize user impact while enabling rapid change. Topics include deployment strategies such as blue green, canary, and rolling updates, feature flagging and progressive delivery, rollback and remediation strategies, database schema migration techniques that avoid downtime, release gating, approval workflows and auditability, disaster recovery and rollback planning, and instrumentation for release observability and post deployment validation. Candidates should also understand change management practices, incident response during releases, minimizing change windows, and cross team coordination between engineering, product, and operations to manage release risk and stakeholder communication.
Backend Infrastructure and Deployment
Covers designing, building, and operating the platform and deployment pipelines for backend services. Topics include cloud architecture with providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, containerization with Docker, orchestration with Kubernetes, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, infrastructure as code for reproducible environments, deployment strategies such as rolling updates, blue green deployments and canary releases, autoscaling and load balancing, service mesh considerations, networking and security at the infrastructure layer, secrets and configuration management, cost optimization, and observability at the platform level. Candidates should describe trade offs and practical experience operating production infrastructure.
Information Technology Automation and Efficiency Optimization
Practical understanding of how automation reduces operational burden increases consistency and improves scalability in information technology environments. Candidates should be able to describe Infrastructure as Code practices and patterns configuration management and immutable infrastructure approaches orchestration and workflow automation the role of continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines event driven automation and run book automation testing and validation of automation safeguard rails such as approvals and change controls measuring efficiency gains and return on investment from automation and trade offs between automation reliability and security.
Information Technology Automation and Operational Efficiency
Evaluate the candidate s strategy for reducing manual work and increasing efficiency through automation. Topics include automation roadmaps, infrastructure automation, configuration management, infrastructure as code, deployment and release automation, runbook and playbook automation, self service capabilities and service catalogs, process orchestration, testing and validation of automation, automation governance and change control, measuring impact on cost and operational cycle time, and lessons learned from automation initiatives including rollback strategies and knowledge transfer. Interviewers may request concrete examples of automation projects and their business impact.