IBM

IBM

Global technology and consulting firm with deep roots in enterprise IT and AI.

3 Rounds ~14 Days Medium
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The Interview Loop

Recruiter Screen (30 min)

Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.

Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)

Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.

Interview Question Bank

DevOps Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you caused a production outage. How did you handle it, and what was the post-mortem process?

#Incident Management #Accountability #Continuous Improvement
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Describe a situation where you disagreed with a developer about a deployment strategy. How did you resolve it?

#Communication #Conflict Resolution #DevOps Culture
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Behavioral • medium

You have multiple urgent alerts firing from Prometheus, and a developer is asking for help with a broken pipeline. How do you prioritize?

#Prioritization #Incident Management #Time Management
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Behavioral • easy

DevOps tools evolve rapidly. Tell me about a recent tool or technology you learned on your own and how you applied it to a project.

#Continuous Learning #Adaptability #Innovation
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a Python script to parse a large Nginx access log file and output the top 10 IP addresses with the most 5xx HTTP errors.

#Python #Log Parsing #Data Structures
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Coding • easy

Write a Bash script that checks the disk usage of a Linux system and sends an alert to a Slack webhook if usage exceeds 85%.

#Bash #Linux #Monitoring #API
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a Python function that interacts with the GitHub API to fetch all open pull requests for a specific repository and filters them by a specific label.

#Python #API #GitHub
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Coding • easy

Write a Bash or Python script to extract specific configuration values from a nested JSON file using jq or the json module.

#Bash #Python #JSON #Data Parsing
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Coding • hard

Given an array of server loads (integers), write a function to distribute the load evenly across two availability zones such that the difference in total load is minimized.

#Algorithms #Dynamic Programming #Optimization
Practice
DevOps Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a secure CI/CD pipeline using Tekton or Jenkins that builds a container image, scans it for vulnerabilities, and deploys it to an OpenShift cluster.

#Tekton #Jenkins #DevSecOps #OpenShift
Practice
DevOps Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a highly available microservices architecture on IBM Cloud. How do you handle load balancing, database replication, and failover?

#IBM Cloud #High Availability #Microservices #Databases
Practice
DevOps Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy for a stateful application running on Kubernetes. How do you ensure RPO and RTO requirements are met?

#Disaster Recovery #Kubernetes #Storage #Architecture
Practice
DevOps Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a centralized logging architecture for a hybrid cloud environment (on-prem and IBM Cloud). What tools would you use and how would you handle log rotation and retention?

#Logging #Hybrid Cloud #Architecture #ELK
Practice
DevOps Engineer • System Design • hard

How would you design a deployment pipeline for edge computing devices (e.g., IBM Edge Application Manager) where network connectivity is intermittent?

#Edge Computing #Architecture #Resilience
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you handle zero-downtime deployments in Red Hat OpenShift, and what routing strategies would you use?

#OpenShift #Kubernetes #Deployments #Routing
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • easy

Walk me through the steps you take when a Kubernetes pod is stuck in a CrashLoopBackOff state.

#Kubernetes #Debugging #Containers
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you manage Terraform state files securely in a multi-developer environment, specifically when deploying to IBM Cloud or AWS?

#Terraform #Security #State Management
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • hard

Explain how you would write an Ansible playbook to patch 1000 Linux servers with minimal downtime, handling failures gracefully.

#Ansible #Linux #Automation #Scale
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain the difference between an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and a Network Load Balancer (NLB). When would you use each in a Kubernetes environment?

#Load Balancing #Networking #Kubernetes
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you inject secrets into a Kubernetes pod securely without hardcoding them in your deployment YAML?

#Kubernetes #Security #Secrets Management
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

If an application is experiencing high latency, how would you use an APM tool like IBM Instana or Prometheus to identify the bottleneck?

#Monitoring #APM #Instana #Prometheus #Troubleshooting
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • hard

Explain the GitOps workflow. How would you implement ArgoCD to manage deployments across multiple OpenShift clusters?

#GitOps #ArgoCD #OpenShift #Continuous Deployment
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • hard

What happens exactly when you type 'ls -l' in a Linux terminal? Walk me through the system calls.

#Linux #OS Internals #System Calls
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

What are Terraform modules, and how do you version control them to ensure backward compatibility for different teams?

#Terraform #Version Control #Reusability
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you optimize a Dockerfile to reduce the image size and improve build times for a Node.js application?

#Docker #Optimization #Node.js
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • easy

Explain the directory structure of an Ansible Role. What is the purpose of the 'handlers' directory?

#Ansible #Automation
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain how Kubernetes Network Policies work. How would you restrict traffic so that only the frontend namespace can communicate with the backend namespace?

#Kubernetes #Networking #Security
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • easy

A Linux server is unresponsive, but you can still SSH into it. How do you determine what is consuming the system resources?

#Linux #Performance Tuning
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

What are Jenkins Shared Libraries, and how do they help in scaling CI/CD pipelines across an enterprise?

#Jenkins #Groovy #Scaling
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain how IAM (Identity and Access Management) works in a cloud environment. How do you implement the principle of least privilege for a CI/CD service account?

#IAM #Cloud Security #Principle of Least Privilege
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain the difference between a PersistentVolume (PV), a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC), and a StorageClass in Kubernetes.

#Kubernetes #Storage
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you detect and remediate configuration drift in an environment managed by Terraform?

#Terraform #Configuration Drift #Automation
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • easy

How do you secure sensitive data like passwords or API keys in Ansible?

#Ansible #Security #Secrets Management
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

What are the key differences between upstream Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift from a security and operational perspective?

#OpenShift #Kubernetes #Security
Practice
DevOps Engineer • Technical • medium

Define SLI, SLO, and SLA. Give an example of how you would define an SLO for a REST API.

#SRE #SLO #Monitoring
Practice

Difficulty Radar

Based on recent AI-sourced data.

Meet Your Interviewers

The "Standard" Interviewer

Senior Engineer

Focuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.

Simulate

Unwritten Rules

Think Out Loud

Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.

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