1. Common Areas to Prepare

These foundational topics apply to all the roles

Understand the Role

• Research job descriptions and responsibilities.
• Understand the overlap and differences between SRE, DevOps, Cloud, and Platform roles.

Technical Foundations

• Linux/Unix Fundamentals: File system, permissions, networking, and command-line tools.
• Networking Basics: DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TCP/IP, VPNs, Load Balancers, Firewalls, etc.
• Programming Skills: Learn one or more scripting/programming languages:
• Python(Any programming languages
• Bash

System Design

Key Topics

• Distributed systems
• Scalability and reliability
• High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR)
• Capacity planning

Key Topics to Prepare

• CI/CD Pipelines
  Tools: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, CircleCI, Spinnaker.
  Skills: Automated testing, deployments, monitoring, and rollback strategies.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  Tools: Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Ansible.
  Skills: Writing reusable IaC templates and managing state.
• Cloud Providers
  Platforms: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure.
  Focus on: Compute, Storage, Networking, IAM, and Managed Services.
• Containers and Orchestration
  Tools: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm.
  Skills: Multi-cluster management, scaling, and monitoring.
• Monitoring and Observability
  Tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic.
  Concepts: Metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting.
• Security and Compliance
  Skills: IAM, Secret Management, Encryption, Firewalls, Compliance Frameworks (SOC 2, GDPR).
  Tools: Vault, AWS IAM, Azure AD, GCP IAM.

CI/CD Pipelines

• Tools: Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, ArgoCD

Key Tasks

• Automating deployments
• Rolling updates and canary releases
• Configuring pipelines for testing, linting, and deployment

Containerization & Orchestration

Tools: Docker, Kubernetes

Key Topics

• Container lifecycle
• Kubernetes architecture (pods, nodes, services, ingress)
• Helm charts

Configuration Management & Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Tools: Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet

Key Tasks

• Writing modular and reusable Terraform code
• Automating configuration for infrastructure setup

Troubleshooting

• Key Scenarios:
• Debugging a failing deployment
• Analyzing logs and metrics for root cause analysis
• Network troubleshooting

2. Role-Specific Focus

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Key Skills

• Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Incident management and blameless postmortems
• Observability (distributed tracing, log aggregation)
• Resiliency patterns (circuit breakers, retries)

Interview Tips

• Be prepared for live troubleshooting scenarios.
• Showcase your ability to automate manual tasks (e.g., using Python or shell scripts).

3. DevOps Engineer

Key Skills

• Deep focus on CI/CD pipelines
• GitOps principles
• Cross-team collaboration and tool integration

Interview Tips

• Highlight experience in setting up and managing CI/CD workflows.
• Explain a real-world scenario where you optimized the deployment process.

4. Platform Engineer

Key Skills

• Building developer-friendly platforms
• API management and service mesh (e.g., Istio, Envoy)
• Platform observability and incident response

Interview Tips

• Show how you’ve built platforms that abstract underlying complexity for developers.
• Demonstrate platform scaling and resource optimization strategies.

5. Cloud Engineer

Key Skills

• Designing cloud-native architectures
• Migrating workloads to the cloud
• Cost optimization and cloud governance

Interview Tips

• Highlight your experience with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud setups.
• Be ready to design cloud solutions for given use cases.

6. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

• Key Focus: Building and managing cloud infrastructure at scale.

Skills to Master

• Writing optimized IaC for multi-region setups.
• Managing VPCs, Subnets, Route Tables, and Firewalls.
• Implementing disaster recovery and backup strategies.

Interview Topics

• Designing VPCs and secure networking in the cloud.
• Automating infrastructure deployments.
• Handling failovers in a multi-region setup.

5. Interview Stages Overview

5.1 Technical Screening

• Format: Online coding tests, system design questions.
• Preparation: Practice on LeetCode, HackerRank, and mock interviews.

5.2 Technical Deep Dive

• Focus: Problem-solving, domain knowledge.
• Common Questions:
• Design a CI/CD pipeline.
• Optimize a Kubernetes cluster.
• Troubleshoot a network performance issue.

5.3 System Design Interview

• Topics: High availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.
• Preparation:
• Read “Designing Data-Intensive Applications.”
• Practice designing systems like URL shorteners or streaming platforms.

5.4 Behavioral Interview(STAR)

• Focus: Cultural fit, problem-solving approach.
• Preparation: Prepare examples showcasing leadership, resilience, and adaptability.

STAR Method

Structure your answers using the STAR format

• Situation: Describe the scenario.
• Task: Explain the challenges or responsibilities.
• Action: Detail the steps you took.
• Result: Share the outcome with metrics if possible

Key Focus Areas

• Team collaboration and conflict resolution.
• Handling incidents and learning from failures.
• Prioritizing tasks under tight deadlines.