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.
Engineering Practices and Delivery Methodology
Understand key engineering practices and their impact on project delivery: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, code review processes, deployment practices, monitoring and observability. Understand different software development methodologies (Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall) and when each is appropriate. Discuss how you've integrated engineering best practices into project planning.
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.
Product Development Lifecycle and Technical Enablement
Covers how platform, tooling, and processes enable product teams to ship quickly and safely. Topics include continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, automated and manual testing strategies, deployment patterns such as phased rollouts and feature flags, release management, infrastructure as code, developer tooling and automation to reduce toil, observability and feedback loops from production to development, and how investments in platform and process balance velocity with operational risk and cost.
Innovation and Developer Platforms
Assess how the candidate fosters an innovation culture and builds internal platforms that increase developer productivity and support experimentation. Topics include the design and operation of internal developer platforms and self service infrastructure to reduce toil; developer experience through onboarding standard libraries and tooling; experimentation platforms and feature flag systems; safe deployment and rollback practices; platform governance and guardrails for security and compliance; observability and metrics for platform health and developer effectiveness; approaches to incubating new ideas measuring their impact and scaling successful experiments; balancing platform standardization with product team autonomy; and organizational practices such as hackathons mentorship and psychological safety that encourage technical risk taking. Probe specific platform architecture choices trade offs and how the candidate measured return on investment.