Rounds
Infrastructure & CI/CD Round
DevOps, observability, and deployment strategies assessment
Overview
This round evaluates a candidate's ability to build, deploy, and maintain production systems. Covers CI/CD pipelines, containerization, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and incident response.
Scoring Rubric
| Dimension | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CI/CD | No pipeline experience | Basic linear pipeline | Multi-stage with quality gates | Advanced: matrix builds, caching, artifacts |
| Containers | Cannot explain Docker basics | Basic Dockerfile | Multi-stage builds, security scanning | K8s orchestration, service mesh |
| IaC | Manual deployments | Basic scripts | Terraform/CloudFormation modules | GitOps, drift detection, blast radius control |
| Observability | No monitoring | Basic logs | Logs + metrics + alerting | Full observability: traces, SLOs, dashboards |
| Incident Response | No process | Ad-hoc debugging | Structured triage, runbooks | Blameless postmortems, chaos engineering |
Key Topics
- GitLab CI/CD pipeline design with quality gates
- Docker multi-stage builds and image optimization
- Kubernetes deployments, services, ingress
- Terraform modules and state management
- Blue-green and canary deployment strategies
- SonarQube integration and code coverage gates
- Log aggregation (ELK/Loki) and metric collection (Prometheus)
- SLA/SLO definition and error budget management