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.
Development Standards and Governance
Focuses on establishing, communicating, and enforcing team and cross team processes that ensure consistent technical quality. Topics include coding standards and style guides, code review policies and workflows, branch and release strategies, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, static analysis and linting toolchains, automated quality gates and pre commit checks, integration of testing into pipelines, metrics for defect rates complexity and coverage, strategies to manage technical debt and legacy code, governance models for exceptions and escalation, and balancing standard strictness with developer productivity. Interviewers look for experience designing standards, driving adoption, integrating tool chains, and measuring impact.
Deployment and Release Strategies
Covers end to end practices, automation, and architectural choices for delivering software safely and frequently. Candidates should understand and be able to compare deployment and upgrade approaches such as blue green deployment, canary releases, rolling updates, recreate deployments, shadow traffic and shadow deployments, and database migration techniques that avoid downtime. This topic includes progressive delivery and feature management practices such as feature flagging, staged rollouts by user cohort or region, staged traffic ramp up, and progressive delivery platforms. Candidates should be able to explain safety controls and verification gates including health checks, automated validation gates, smoke testing and staging verification, automated rollback criteria, and emergency rollback procedures. They should understand zero downtime patterns, rollback complexity and mechanisms, capacity and resource requirements, latency and consistency trade offs, and techniques to reduce blast radius and deployment risk. The topic also covers release engineering and operational practices such as release orchestration across environments, deployment automation and pipelines, continuous integration and continuous delivery practices, approvals and release management processes, incident response and communication during releases, chaos testing to validate resilience, and observability and monitoring to detect regressions and measure release health. Candidates should be able to describe metrics to measure deployment velocity and reliability such as deployment frequency, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate, and explain how to design frameworks, automation, and operational processes to enable frequent safe deployments at scale.
Infrastructure Tooling and Developer Experience
Covers building the platform, tools, and processes that enable engineers to move quickly and safely. Topics include continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, release strategies such as canary and blue green deployments, build systems, monorepo versus polyrepo trade offs, local development environments and reproducibility, feature flagging, test automation and test infrastructure, dependency and package management, developer portals and internal SDKs, service templates, observability and logging for developer feedback, automated security and compliance scanning, infrastructure as code, and developer productivity measurement. Also addresses platform team scope, adoption strategies, developer onboarding, documentation and training, and balancing platform standardization with team autonomy.
Engineering Velocity and Execution
Evaluates how a candidate measures and improves the ability of an engineering organization to deliver software quickly and reliably. Topics include defining and tracking flow and velocity metrics such as lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to recovery, cycle time, and work in progress. Candidates should explain practical levers for accelerating delivery including continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, automated testing, release engineering, and feature flagging; organizational levers such as small cross functional teams, clear ownership, minimizing handoffs, and limiting batch size; and process levers such as rapid feedback loops and post deployment monitoring. Strong answers show how velocity improvements were implemented, how bottlenecks were identified and removed, how trade offs between speed and quality were managed, and how gains were measured and sustained.