My DevOps Interview at a Fast-Paced Startup

The interview process at InnovateTech was intense but rewarding. It started with a take-home challenge where I had to containerize a sample application and create a basic CI/CD pipeline for it using GitHub Actions.

The Technical Round

The main technical interview was a 90-minute session with two senior engineers. We dove deep into:

• Kubernetes: They asked about the difference between a Deployment and a StatefulSet, how I would handle secrets, and to describe the lifecycle of a Pod.
• AWS: We discussed designing a scalable and fault-tolerant architecture for a web application using services like EC2 Auto Scaling, RDS, and S3.
• System Design: The final part was a system design question: "Design a logging and monitoring system for a microservices architecture." I whiteboarded a solution using Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for visualization, and the ELK stack for logging.

Key Takeaway

My biggest takeaway was the importance of hands-on experience. Being able to talk about projects where I had actually implemented these tools was far more impactful than just knowing the theory. They cared a lot about my thought process and how I approached trade-offs.