Experience Interviewing for an Infrastructure Engineer - Continuous Delivery position

Been a while since I got to write to this blog. Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing for an Infrastructure Engineer - Continuous Delivery position for a company based in Dallas, Texas. I wanted to pen down my experience while the memory is fresh and possibly help others in the same pursuits.

The first round was the typical HR round where the interviewer requested to know more about my experience in the DevOps / Infrastructure engineering field and gauge my interest in the position / learn about my background. It included a lot of open-ended questions such as can you please explain your role in your current position.

The next round was considerably more interesting and included more pointed questions about my experience in particular tools and working platforms. The interviewer also took the time to explain the role and the need for this position. 

After passing this round, I received a take-home exam, the exam question is as follows:

Hi Srikar,

We're excited to continue our recruiting process with you, and would love to dig into an exercise to further understand your skillset! This practical exercise will give us insight into your analytical, technical, and strategic thinking skills.  

Using the CI tool of your choice, create a CI/CD pipeline to build, test, publish and deploy a Hello World web application (in the language of your choice) that gets deployed to a Kubernetes cluster. You can either use EKS, or just spin up an EC2 instance and use k3s or some other quick deploy tool. If you go that route, make sure we can access the instance when you're done.

Bonus points:

* Use Infrastructure as code wherever possible

* Application can be scaled, preferably automatically, to handle increased loads.

* Changes to the application can be audited and quickly rolled back if needed

Upon completion, we'd like to see whatever code was written, and a brief summary of the tools chosen and why. Once you've gotten a chance to look this over, please use the following credentials to complete:

 This was a very interesting question -> I forked another gentleman's repo and built the following (https://github.com/srikarkc/myfirstapp). 

It was a very interesting assignment, learned a lot of new things. The final round of the assignment included questioning the choices that I made in the application and how I would improve the application if it were to be in a production environment.

Update - June 29, 2022 -> Unfortunately, due to changing business needs, the position was put on hold and I didn't head back with an offer. While this was disappointing to hear after putting so much time and effort into it, I'm glad I didn't accept the position and then learn about the company's financial hardships. This also provided me a good learning opportunity that I hope to put into practice in further blog posts.