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.
Software Development Lifecycle and Tradeoffs
Covers fundamental software development lifecycle concepts and the technical tradeoffs made during product development. Topics include the lifecycle phases of requirements gathering and analysis, design, implementation and development, testing, deployment, and maintenance, and awareness of different lifecycle models such as waterfall, agile and scrum, and iterative development. Also covers practical engineering techniques and tradeoffs such as feature flags, split testing, blue green deployments, canary releases, technical debt, and how decisions affect velocity quality and maintainability. Emphasis is on understanding how individual engineering work fits into the broader process and how to reason about tradeoffs between speed cost scalability and code quality.
Continuous Integration and Delivery Pipelines
Design and implement continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that reliably build, test, validate, and deploy applications and infrastructure. Topics include pipeline as code practices, defining stages and triggers for builds and tests, automated testing strategies across unit, integration, smoke, and end to end tests, gating and environment promotion, branching and release strategies, artifact management and versioning, and deployment patterns such as rolling updates, blue green deployments, and canary releases. Candidates should be able to design rollback and recovery procedures, integrate infrastructure provisioning into pipelines, select and configure pipeline tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure Pipelines, or cloud vendor pipeline services, and reason about observability and reporting for pipeline health and test execution. Practical considerations include environment parity, pipeline security, secrets handling, pipeline as code best practices, and trade offs between speed and safety.
Mobile App Deployment and Release Management
Processes and tooling for building packaging and releasing mobile applications and updates. Topics include platform specific store submission and review processes, code signing and provisioning, versioning strategies and compatibility policies, beta distribution and staged rollouts, release tracks and channel management, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, rollback and hotfix workflows, migration strategies for client and server changes, and compliance and privacy considerations during releases.