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.
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.
Cloud Platform Experience
Personal account of hands on experience using public cloud providers and the concrete results delivered. Candidates should describe specific services and patterns they used for compute, storage, networking, managed databases, serverless and eventing, and explain their role in architecture decisions, deployments, automation and infrastructure as code practices, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, container orchestration, scaling and performance tuning, monitoring and incident response, and cost management. Interviewees should quantify outcomes when possible with metrics such as latency reduction, cost savings, availability improvements or deployment frequency and note any formal training or certifications. This topic evaluates depth of practical experience, ownership, and the ability to operate and improve cloud systems in production.
Staying Current With Infrastructure Evolution
This topic evaluates how a candidate stays informed about new infrastructure technologies and operational practices and how they evaluate, trial, and adopt them safely. It covers information channels such as technical publications, community forums, conferences, vendor roadmaps, and research; frameworks for assessing maturity, compatibility, and total cost of ownership; approaches to proof of concept and benchmarking; pilot and staged rollout strategies to limit operational risk; criteria for avoiding vendor lock in; and governance for deprecating legacy systems and managing technology risk across teams.
Infrastructure Strategy and Evolution
Long term planning and strategic thinking about how infrastructure and platform services should evolve to meet future business and technical needs. Topics include capacity forecasting and scaling strategy, platform modularity and extensibility, technology lifecycle and deprecation planning, migration and upgrade roadmaps, trade offs between cost and resilience, operational readiness and automation, multi region and hybrid deployment considerations, backward compatibility and application programming interface stability, security and compliance planning, and aligning infrastructure roadmaps with product and business priorities.
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.
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.
IP Addressing and Subnetting
Covers designing and calculating Internet Protocol addressing for networks, including both strategic planning and low level subnetting math. Candidates should be able to design addressing schemes that account for number of hosts, growth, scalability, and segmentation such as virtual local area network addressing, reserve addresses for gateways and infrastructure, and document address plans. Must understand Internet Protocol version 4 and Internet Protocol version 6 addressing models, classful versus classless allocation, subnet masks, classless inter domain routing notation, and how to compute network addresses, broadcast addresses, and usable host ranges. Includes public versus private addressing, address conservation techniques, address aggregation and summarization, considerations for routing and summarization, and operational topics such as static versus dynamic assignment and how addressing choices interact with network services and translation mechanisms.
Cloud Infrastructure Knowledge (AWS/GCP/Azure)
Have working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform: common services (EC2/Compute Engine, RDS/Cloud SQL, S3/Cloud Storage, Load Balancers, VPCs, networking), typical failure modes, and how to troubleshoot within that platform. Understand concepts like availability zones, regions, and cross-region failover.