TCS
Large multinational IT services and consulting enterprise based in India.
3 Rounds
~14 Days
Medium
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
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you had to push back on a client or a project manager who proposed an unrealistic timeline for a cloud migration.
#Communication
#Stakeholder Management
#Agile
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you were handling a P1 (Priority 1) production outage in a cloud environment. What was your role and how did you resolve it?
#Troubleshooting
#Under Pressure
#Operations
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
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easy
Cloud technology evolves rapidly. Tell me about a time you had to learn a completely new cloud service or tool on the job to deliver a client requirement.
#Continuous Learning
#Problem Solving
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
How do you ensure that security and compliance standards (like HIPAA or PCI-DSS) are maintained when deploying infrastructure for a client?
#DevSecOps
#Governance
#Best Practices
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you proactively identified a way to save costs or optimize performance in a cloud environment without being asked.
#FinOps
#Proactivity
#Value Addition
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
As a Cloud Engineer at TCS, you will often interact with non-technical stakeholders. Give an example of how you explained a complex cloud architecture to someone without a technical background.
#Client Facing
#Soft Skills
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
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hard
Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with a senior architect's or client's proposed technical design. How did you handle the disagreement?
#Teamwork
#Professionalism
#Technical Debate
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
•
easy
What is your approach to documenting infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and operational runbooks? Why is it important?
#Documentation
#Knowledge Sharing
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a cloud project that failed, missed a deadline, or didn't go as planned. What went wrong and what did you learn from it?
#Failure
#Lessons Learned
#Accountability
Cloud Engineer
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Behavioral
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easy
Why do you want to join TCS as a Cloud Engineer, and how do you feel about working in a consulting environment where you may switch clients and tech stacks periodically?
#Motivation
#Consulting
#Flexibility
Cloud Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Write a Python script using Boto3 to find all unattached EBS volumes in an AWS region and delete them if they have been unattached for more than 30 days.
#Python
#Boto3
#AWS
#Automation
Cloud Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Write a Bash script to parse an Nginx access.log file and output the top 10 IP addresses with the highest number of requests.
#Bash
#Linux
#Log Parsing
Cloud Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a Terraform module that provisions an AWS EC2 instance, a Security Group allowing SSH only from a specific IP, and outputs the instance's public IP.
#Terraform
#AWS
#Security Groups
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a declarative Jenkinsfile (or GitHub Actions YAML) that checks out code, builds a Docker image, pushes it to a registry, and deploys it to a Kubernetes cluster.
#Jenkins
#GitHub Actions
#Pipelines
#Docker
Cloud Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a Kubernetes Deployment YAML for a Node.js application. Include resource requests/limits, a liveness probe, and 3 replicas.
#Kubernetes
#YAML
#Configuration
Cloud Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script that calls a REST API with pagination to fetch a list of users, extracts their email addresses, and saves them to a CSV file.
#Python
#APIs
#Data Processing
Cloud Engineer
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Coding
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easy
Write a SQL query to find the second highest salary from an 'Employees' table. (A common basic check in TCS technical rounds).
#SQL
#Queries
Cloud Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a highly available, fault-tolerant 3-tier web application architecture on AWS for a global e-commerce client expecting massive traffic spikes during Black Friday.
#AWS
#High Availability
#Scalability
#Architecture
Cloud Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a serverless data processing pipeline on GCP or AWS that triggers when a CSV file is uploaded, validates the data, and loads it into a data warehouse.
#Serverless
#Data Pipeline
#Event-Driven Architecture
Cloud Engineer
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System Design
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hard
A healthcare client requires a Disaster Recovery (DR) setup with an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 1 hour. How would you design this across two cloud regions?
#Disaster Recovery
#RTO/RPO
#Architecture
Cloud Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a centralized logging and monitoring solution for a hybrid cloud environment (on-premise VMs and Azure AKS).
#Observability
#Logging
#Hybrid Cloud
Cloud Engineer
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System Design
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hard
A TCS client has a monthly AWS bill of $500,000 and wants to reduce it by 20%. Walk me through your architectural and operational approach to Cloud Cost Optimization (FinOps).
#FinOps
#Cost Optimization
#AWS
Cloud Engineer
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System Design
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hard
How would you design a zero-downtime database migration from an on-premise Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL?
#Database Migration
#AWS DMS
#Zero Downtime
Cloud Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design an authentication and authorization flow for a microservices-based application using API Gateway and Identity Providers.
#Security
#Microservices
#OAuth/OIDC
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
In a multi-environment setup for a TCS enterprise client, how do you securely manage and share Terraform state files, and what happens if two engineers apply changes simultaneously?
#Terraform
#State Management
#Concurrency
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
A client's microservice deployed on Amazon EKS is repeatedly going into a CrashLoopBackOff state. Walk me through your step-by-step troubleshooting process.
#Kubernetes
#Troubleshooting
#Docker
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
A financial client is migrating 50 different on-premise applications to AWS, each requiring its own VPC. How would you architect the network connectivity to ensure they can communicate with on-premise servers efficiently?
#AWS
#Transit Gateway
#VPC Peering
#Hybrid Cloud
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between Azure ExpressRoute and Azure VPN Gateway. When would you recommend one over the other for a TCS client?
#Azure
#Networking
#Hybrid Cloud
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
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easy
A retail client is storing terabytes of transaction logs in Amazon S3, leading to high monthly bills. How would you automate cost optimization for this storage?
#AWS S3
#Cost Optimization
#Lifecycle Policies
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you implement cross-account access in AWS? For example, allowing a CI/CD pipeline in an 'Operations' account to deploy resources in a 'Production' account.
#AWS IAM
#Cross-Account Roles
#Security
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
We noticed our Docker image builds for a Java Spring Boot application are taking too long and the final image size is over 1GB. How would you optimize this?
#Docker
#Optimization
#CI/CD
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between Blue-Green and Canary deployment strategies. Which one would you choose for a mission-critical banking application and why?
#Deployment Strategies
#DevOps
#Risk Management
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
easy
TCS often uses the '6 R's' framework for cloud migration. Can you explain the difference between Replatforming and Refactoring?
#Migration Strategies
#Cloud Architecture
Cloud Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
How do you secure communication between different microservices running inside the same Kubernetes cluster?
#Kubernetes
#Network Policies
#Service Mesh
Difficulty Radar
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Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.