Infrastructure knowledge is increasingly expected of senior backend engineers, not just DevOps specialists. Interviewers want to know that you understand containerization, orchestration trade-offs, and how to design deployment pipelines that don’t cause outages.
These 8 questions cover the infrastructure concepts most relevant to senior interviews: Docker internals, Kubernetes architecture, CI/CD best practices, and cloud-native design patterns. Understanding these helps you bridge the gap between writing code and running it reliably in production.
A Pod and a Deployment solve different problems in Kubernetes. Understanding the distinction is fundamental to using Kubernetes correctly.
Read full answer →Kubernetes uses probes to determine the health of a container, but liveness and readiness probes serve fundamentally different purposes and trigger different control-plane actions.
Read full answer →ConfigMaps and Secrets both decouple configuration from container images, but they differ in their intended sensitivity, storage handling, and access controls.
Read full answer →Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. A **Helm chart** is a directory of files that together define a deployable unit: Go-templated Kubernetes manifests, a `values.yaml` file of defaults, a `Chart.yaml` with metadata, and optionally subcharts and lifecycle hooks.
Read full answer →Containers and VMs both provide isolated execution environments, but they achieve isolation at different layers of the stack.
Read full answer →A CI/CD pipeline automates the path from a code commit to a running production deployment, enforcing quality gates at each stage to catch issues early when they are cheapest to fix.
Read full answer →Production observability rests on three pillars—logs, metrics, and traces—and effective logging and monitoring practices make the difference between a 5-minute and 5-hour incident resolution.
Read full answer →An effective alerting system maximises signal and minimises noise—every alert that fires should require a human response, and every condition requiring a human response should fire an alert. Achieving this balance is harder than it appears.
Read full answer →Focus on the operational layer. What does a container image actually contain, how does the Kubernetes scheduler pick a node, what’s the difference between rolling and blue-green deployments. Interviewers listen for whether you’ve owned a deploy pipeline in production or only used one — the tell is whether you name failure modes unprompted.
Study what breaks. What happens when a pod OOMs, how does Kubernetes recover, what a CI/CD outage looks like at 3am. The framing that scores is “what would break and how would I detect it” — not “here’s the happy path.”
Take a free AI-graded assessment across multiple domains. No signup required.
Start Free Assessment