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+# Technical Interview Question Banks
+
+**Comprehensive question banks for interviewing infrastructure engineers across domains.**
+
+---
+
+## Interview Philosophy
+
+**What we're assessing:**
+1. **Technical depth:** Do they know their domain?
+2. **Problem-solving:** How do they approach problems?
+3. **Communication:** Can they explain complex topics clearly?
+4. **Trade-offs:** Do they understand the "why" behind decisions?
+5. **Growth:** Do they learn and adapt?
+
+**What we're NOT doing:**
+- Gotcha questions or trivia
+- Whiteboard coding (unless role-specific)
+- Memorization tests
+- Puzzle questions with no real-world relevance
+
+---
+
+## Platform Engineering Questions
+
+### Kubernetes
+
+**Junior/Mid-level (L3-L4):**
+
+1. **"Explain what happens when you run `kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml`"**
+   - Looking for: Understanding of K8s API, controllers, reconciliation loop
+   - Follow-up: "What if the deployment already exists?"
+
+2. **"How does service discovery work in Kubernetes?"**
+   - Looking for: Services, DNS, kube-proxy, networking basics
+   - Follow-up: "What's the difference between ClusterIP, NodePort, and LoadBalancer?"
+
+3. **"You deploy a new version of your app and it's crashlooping. How do you debug?"**
+   - Looking for: kubectl logs, describe, events; systematic approach
+   - Follow-up: "What if logs don't show anything useful?"
+
+4. **"What's the difference between a Deployment, StatefulSet, and DaemonSet?"**
+   - Looking for: Use cases, stateful vs stateless, scheduling
+   - Follow-up: "When would you use each one?"
+
+**Senior (L5):**
+
+5. **"Design a multi-tenant Kubernetes architecture where tenants are isolated"**
+   - Looking for: Namespaces, RBAC, network policies, resource quotas
+   - Follow-up: "How do you handle shared resources like storage?"
+
+6. **"Explain Kubernetes networking in depth"**
+   - Looking for: CNI, pod-to-pod, pod-to-service, ingress/egress
+   - Follow-up: "How does service mesh fit into this?"
+
+7. **"Your K8s cluster is running out of capacity. Walk me through scaling options"**
+   - Looking for: Horizontal pod autoscaling, cluster autoscaling, node sizing
+   - Follow-up: "What metrics would you use for autoscaling?"
+
+8. **"Design a GitOps workflow for managing 100+ K8s clusters"**
+   - Looking for: ArgoCD/Flux, Git as source of truth, promotion strategies
+   - Follow-up: "How do you handle secrets and environment-specific config?"
+
+**Staff+ (L6+):**
+
+9. **"Design a Kubernetes platform for 200 engineers across 50 teams"**
+   - Looking for: Multi-tenancy, self-service, guardrails, cost management
+   - Follow-up: "How do you prevent one tenant from impacting others?"
+
+10. **"Explain your approach to Kubernetes upgrades across 20+ clusters"**
+    - Looking for: Upgrade strategy, testing, rollback, minimal downtime
+    - Follow-up: "What's your process for testing breaking changes?"
+
+### Infrastructure as Code
+
+**Junior/Mid-level (L3-L4):**
+
+11. **"What is Terraform state and why does it matter?"**
+    - Looking for: State management, locking, backends, collaboration
+    - Follow-up: "What problems arise with state management?"
+
+12. **"How do you structure Terraform code for multiple environments?"**
+    - Looking for: Workspaces, modules, separate state files, variables
+    - Follow-up: "What are the trade-offs of each approach?"
+
+13. **"Walk me through how you would provision a VPC with Terraform"**
+    - Looking for: Resources, dependencies, variables, outputs
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle CIDR ranges across environments?"
+
+**Senior (L5):**
+
+14. **"Design a Terraform module structure for a large organization"**
+    - Looking for: Module composition, versioning, testing, documentation
+    - Follow-up: "How do you prevent breaking changes?"
+
+15. **"Compare Terraform vs Pulumi vs CloudFormation - when would you use each?"**
+    - Looking for: Trade-offs, use cases, team skills, cloud provider lock-in
+    - Follow-up: "How do you migrate between tools?"
+
+16. **"How do you handle secrets and sensitive data in IaC?"**
+    - Looking for: Separate secret management, encryption, vaults, never commit
+    - Follow-up: "What about API keys needed during provisioning?"
+
+**Staff+ (L6+):**
+
+17. **"Design an IaC strategy for multi-cloud (AWS + Azure + GCP)"**
+    - Looking for: Abstraction levels, provider selection, common patterns
+    - Follow-up: "How do you prevent vendor lock-in while staying pragmatic?"
+
+18. **"Explain your approach to infrastructure drift detection and remediation"**
+    - Looking for: Drift detection tools, CI/CD integration, enforcement strategies
+    - Follow-up: "How do you balance manual changes vs strict enforcement?"
+
+### CI/CD
+
+**Junior/Mid-level (L3-L4):**
+
+19. **"Design a CI/CD pipeline for a web application"**
+    - Looking for: Build, test, deploy stages, artifact storage, environments
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle database migrations?"
+
+20. **"Explain the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment"**
+    - Looking for: Manual approval gate vs fully automated
+    - Follow-up: "When would you choose one over the other?"
+
+21. **"How do you implement blue-green deployment?"**
+    - Looking for: Two environments, traffic switching, rollback capability
+    - Follow-up: "What are the challenges and trade-offs?"
+
+**Senior (L5):**
+
+22. **"Design a deployment pipeline with staging, canary, and production"**
+    - Looking for: Progressive rollout, metrics-based promotion, automated rollback
+    - Follow-up: "What metrics would trigger rollback?"
+
+23. **"How do you secure a CI/CD pipeline?"**
+    - Looking for: Secrets management, access control, image scanning, SBOM
+    - Follow-up: "Where are the most common security vulnerabilities?"
+
+24. **"Design a pipeline for a monorepo with 20 services"**
+    - Looking for: Selective builds, dependency graph, parallel execution
+    - Follow-up: "How do you optimize build time?"
+
+**Staff+ (L6+):**
+
+25. **"Design a deployment system for 100+ microservices"**
+    - Looking for: Self-service, templates, safety rails, observability
+    - Follow-up: "How do you enforce standards without blocking teams?"
+
+26. **"Explain your strategy for handling breaking changes in shared services"**
+    - Looking for: API versioning, gradual migration, consumer coordination
+    - Follow-up: "How do you deprecate old versions?"
+
+---
+
+## SRE Questions
+
+### Incident Response
+
+**All levels:**
+
+27. **"It's 3 AM. You get paged: API p99 latency jumped from 100ms to 5s. Walk me through your response."**
+    - Looking for: Systematic approach, triage, mitigation vs resolution
+    - L3-L4: Follow runbook, escalate appropriately
+    - L5: Lead investigation, coordinate response
+    - L6+: Design systems to prevent this class of incident
+
+28. **"After resolving an incident, what do you do?"**
+    - Looking for: Postmortem, action items, learning, prevention
+    - Follow-up: "How do you ensure action items get completed?"
+
+29. **"Describe a time you debugged a complex production issue"**
+    - Looking for: Problem-solving approach, tools used, collaboration
+    - Follow-up: "What did you learn? How did you prevent recurrence?"
+
+### SLO/SLI/SLA
+
+**Junior/Mid-level (L3-L4):**
+
+30. **"Explain the difference between SLI, SLO, and SLA"**
+    - Looking for: Clear definitions, examples
+    - SLI: Metric (e.g., p99 latency)
+    - SLO: Target (e.g., p99 < 200ms, 99.9% of time)
+    - SLA: Contract with customer (external)
+
+31. **"How would you choose SLIs for a web API?"**
+    - Looking for: Availability, latency, throughput, error rate
+    - Follow-up: "Which percentiles matter? Why?"
+
+**Senior (L5):**
+
+32. **"Design SLOs for a payment processing service"**
+    - Looking for: Business alignment, measurable, realistic, four golden signals
+    - Follow-up: "How do you set targets? What's the error budget?"
+
+33. **"Your SLO is being breached. What do you do?"**
+    - Looking for: Incident response, communication, prioritization
+    - Follow-up: "How do you use error budgets to make decisions?"
+
+**Staff+ (L6+):**
+
+34. **"Design an org-wide SLO framework for 50+ services"**
+    - Looking for: Standardization, tooling, measurement, reporting
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle services with different criticality?"
+
+### Monitoring & Observability
+
+**Junior/Mid-level (L3-L4):**
+
+35. **"What's the difference between metrics, logs, and traces?"**
+    - Looking for: Three pillars of observability, use cases for each
+    - Follow-up: "When would you use each one?"
+
+36. **"How do you design an alert that doesn't cause alert fatigue?"**
+    - Looking for: Actionable, paged only for real issues, clear runbook
+    - Follow-up: "What makes a bad alert?"
+
+**Senior (L5):**
+
+37. **"Explain distributed tracing and why it's useful"**
+    - Looking for: Trace context, spans, service dependencies, latency debugging
+    - Follow-up: "How do you implement tracing in microservices?"
+
+38. **"Design a monitoring strategy for a microservices architecture"**
+    - Looking for: Service-level metrics, inter-service traces, log aggregation
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle cardinality explosion?"
+
+**Staff+ (L6+):**
+
+39. **"Design an observability platform for the entire organization"**
+    - Looking for: Tool selection, cost management, adoption strategy
+    - Follow-up: "How do you balance cost vs. visibility?"
+
+---
+
+## Security Engineering Questions
+
+### Application Security
+
+**Junior/Mid-level (L3-L4):**
+
+40. **"What's the OWASP Top 10? Pick one and explain it."**
+    - Looking for: Awareness of common vulnerabilities, SQL injection, XSS, etc.
+    - Follow-up: "How do you prevent this vulnerability?"
+
+41. **"Explain how you'd implement secrets management for applications"**
+    - Looking for: Don't hardcode, use vault/secrets manager, rotation
+    - Follow-up: "What about local development?"
+
+42. **"What's SAST vs DAST vs SCA?"**
+    - Looking for: Static vs dynamic vs supply chain analysis
+    - Follow-up: "When in the pipeline should each run?"
+
+**Senior (L5):**
+
+43. **"Design a secure CI/CD pipeline"**
+    - Looking for: Image scanning, secrets scanning, SBOM, signed artifacts
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle vulnerabilities found in production?"
+
+44. **"Explain Zero Trust architecture"**
+    - Looking for: Never trust, always verify, micro-segmentation, identity-based
+    - Follow-up: "How do you implement this in practice?"
+
+45. **"How would you secure a Kubernetes cluster?"**
+    - Looking for: RBAC, network policies, pod security policies, image scanning
+    - Follow-up: "What about secrets management?"
+
+**Staff+ (L6+):**
+
+46. **"Design a security program for a 200-engineer organization"**
+    - Looking for: AppSec, infrastructure security, compliance, training
+    - Follow-up: "How do you balance security vs developer velocity?"
+
+47. **"Explain your approach to compliance automation (SOC2, ISO 27001)"**
+    - Looking for: Policy as code, evidence collection, continuous compliance
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle exceptions and special cases?"
+
+### Threat Modeling & Incident Response
+
+**All levels:**
+
+48. **"Walk me through how you'd threat model this system: [present architecture]"**
+    - Looking for: STRIDE or similar framework, systematic approach
+    - Follow-up: "What mitigations would you recommend?"
+
+49. **"You discover a critical vulnerability in production. What do you do?"**
+    - Looking for: Assess risk, patch quickly, communicate, postmortem
+    - Follow-up: "How do you balance speed vs thoroughness?"
+
+---
+
+## Cloud Engineering Questions
+
+### AWS
+
+**Junior/Mid-level (L3-L4):**
+
+50. **"Explain the difference between EC2, ECS, and Lambda"**
+    - Looking for: VMs vs containers vs serverless, use cases
+    - Follow-up: "When would you use each?"
+
+51. **"How do you design a VPC?"**
+    - Looking for: Public/private subnets, NAT gateway, security groups, CIDR
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle multi-AZ?"
+
+52. **"What's the difference between S3 storage classes?"**
+    - Looking for: Standard, IA, Glacier - cost vs access frequency
+    - Follow-up: "How do you optimize storage costs?"
+
+**Senior (L5):**
+
+53. **"Design a highly available, multi-region architecture on AWS"**
+    - Looking for: Route53, ALB, RDS multi-AZ, data replication
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle failover?"
+
+54. **"Explain your approach to AWS cost optimization"**
+    - Looking for: Right-sizing, reserved instances, spot, S3 lifecycle
+    - Follow-up: "How do you track and allocate costs?"
+
+55. **"Design a zero-trust network on AWS"**
+    - Looking for: Private subnets, VPC endpoints, IAM, encryption
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle third-party integrations?"
+
+**Staff+ (L6+):**
+
+56. **"Design a multi-account AWS strategy for an enterprise"**
+    - Looking for: AWS Organizations, account structure, IAM federation
+    - Follow-up: "How do you handle centralized logging and security?"
+
+### Multi-Cloud
+
+**Senior+ (L5+):**
+
+57. **"Compare AWS, Azure, and GCP - strengths and weaknesses"**
+    - Looking for: Realistic trade-offs, not just "AWS is best"
+    - Follow-up: "When would you choose Azure over AWS?"
+
+58. **"Design a multi-cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in"**
+    - Looking for: Abstraction layers, Terraform, Kubernetes as common platform
+    - Follow-up: "What are the costs and trade-offs of multi-cloud?"
+
+---
+
+## Behavioral/Situational Questions
+
+### For All Roles
+
+**Collaboration:**
+59. **"Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision. How did you handle it?"**
+    - Looking for: Respectful disagreement, data-driven argument, willingness to disagree and commit
+
+60. **"Describe a time you had to work with a difficult teammate"**
+    - Looking for: Empathy, communication, conflict resolution
+
+**Problem-Solving:**
+61. **"Tell me about the most complex technical problem you've solved"**
+    - Looking for: Analytical thinking, systematic approach, persistence
+
+62. **"Describe a time you made a technical decision that turned out to be wrong. What did you learn?"**
+    - Looking for: Ownership, learning, adaptation
+
+**Leadership:**
+63. **"Tell me about a time you mentored someone"**
+    - Looking for: Teaching ability, patience, investment in others
+
+64. **"Describe a situation where you improved a process or system"**
+    - Looking for: Initiative, impact, follow-through
+
+**Growth:**
+65. **"How do you stay current with technology?"**
+    - Looking for: Continuous learning, experimentation, community engagement
+
+66. **"Tell me about a time you had to learn something completely new under tight deadline"**
+    - Looking for: Learning agility, resourcefulness, grit
+
+---
+
+## System Design Questions
+
+### Platform Engineering
+
+67. **"Design a deployment system for 100 microservices"**
+    - Looking for: GitOps, progressive rollout, self-service, observability
+    - 30-40 min discussion, whiteboard/diagram
+
+68. **"Design a developer platform that enables teams to deploy to K8s"**
+    - Looking for: Abstractions, templates, guardrails, documentation
+    - Assess: Architecture thinking, trade-offs, user empathy
+
+### SRE
+
+69. **"Design a monitoring and alerting system for a microservices application"**
+    - Looking for: Service mesh observability, distributed tracing, SLO-based alerting
+    - Assess: Observability best practices, scalability
+
+70. **"Design a disaster recovery strategy for this system: [present architecture]"**
+    - Looking for: RTO/RPO, backup strategy, runbooks, testing
+    - Assess: Risk assessment, operational thinking
+
+### Security
+
+71. **"Design a secrets management system for 50+ services"**
+    - Looking for: Vault/secrets manager, rotation, access control, audit
+    - Assess: Security depth, operational considerations
+
+72. **"Design a security scanning pipeline for containers"**
+    - Looking for: Image scanning, CVE management, policy enforcement
+    - Assess: Security + developer experience balance
+
+---
+
+## Red Flags in Answers
+
+Watch for:
+- **Blaming others:** "My team didn't understand Kubernetes"
+- **No trade-offs:** Everything is "the best" without nuance
+- **No depth:** Surface-level answers, can't go deeper when probed
+- **Arrogance:** "I'm the only one who could do it"
+- **No learning:** Can't cite recent learning or mistakes
+- **Buzz
+
+word bingo:** Using terms without understanding
+- **No questions:** Doesn't ask clarifying questions in design problems
+
+---
+
+## Evaluation Rubrics
+
+### Technical Depth
+
+| Score | Description |
+|-------|-------------|
+| 1 | Surface-level knowledge, significant gaps |
+| 2 | Basic understanding, struggles with follow-ups |
+| 3 | Solid fundamentals, can discuss trade-offs |
+| 4 | Deep expertise, insightful answers |
+| 5 | Expert level, teaches interviewer something new |
+
+### Problem-Solving
+
+| Score | Description |
+|-------|-------------|
+| 1 | Jumps to solution without analysis |
+| 2 | Some structure, but misses key considerations |
+| 3 | Systematic approach, asks clarifying questions |
+| 4 | Thoughtful analysis, considers alternatives |
+| 5 | Exceptional problem-solving, innovative solutions |
+
+### Communication
+
+| Score | Description |
+|-------|-------------|
+| 1 | Unclear, rambling, hard to follow |
+| 2 | Somewhat clear but disorganized |
+| 3 | Clear explanation, organized thoughts |
+| 4 | Very clear, adapts to audience |
+| 5 | Exceptional communication, visual aids, examples |
+
+---
+
+## Key Takeaways for Interviewers
+
+1. **Ask open-ended questions** that reveal thinking process
+2. **Probe deeper** - don't accept surface-level answers
+3. **Assess trade-offs** - "What are the pros/cons of your approach?"
+4. **Look for learning** - Can they admit mistakes and learn?
+5. **Evaluate collaboration** - How do they work with others?
+6. **Be consistent** - Ask same questions to compare candidates
+7. **Take notes** - Record specific examples for calibration
+8. **Focus on potential** - Hire for growth, not just current skills
+9. **Avoid gotchas** - Real-world problems, not trivia
+10. **Sell the role** - Interviewing is two-way, make them want to join
+
+Great interviews reveal how candidates think, not just what they know.