Amazon Web Services DevOps Consultant interview questions

The AWS interview process was very different to all others I've experience in my career. A recruiter reached out to me about an opportunity with AWS and after an initial phone screen, she guided me through the whole process with lots of articles and information to prepare for the 2 rounds of interviews. The recruiter even did two 30 min presentations before each round of interviews to explain the process, the type of questions I would be asked, and to help for both. The first round was a 1 hour phone interview with a Sr. DevOps Consultant in which I was asked to pseudo-code a sorting algorithm for a list of numbers to obtain second largest and second smaller. I was also asked a lot of general DevOps knowledge about Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, Code Repositories, Networking, and Deployment Strategies. I was also asked about my DevOps experiences at other companies and to describe deployment strategy for creating a few VMs inside AWS and to deploy an application. The second round was an almost all day 5 panel virtual interview for a total of 6 hours with 5 different sets of people which contained technical and behavioral questions related to the role. The first panel focused on technical depth of knowledge and I was asked to design an infrastructure as code repository using Terraform as a language to deploy one and then multiple environments using the same repository, I was also asked to design an example deployment pipeline using Jenkins or another CI/CD tool to deploy a container application. The second panel focused on technical breadth and I was asked for examples of a three tier application system for a web application at a high-level. I was asked to design storage, compute, network, routing, high-availability, resilience, and similar cloud concepts. The last three panels asked Behavioral questions focused on Amazon's Leadership Principles to measure my past performance against the company values and if I would be a good fit for the team.

One of the most irritating interviews.. I was surprised how big company such was interacts with candidates in such old school boring way: telephone screening, asking random questions , specific technical ones, you do not recall out of our memory then you do not pass... E.g if you answer briefly what is TCP/IP 3 way handshake, that is not enough! basically you need to learn by heart all specs from a book or something. As consultant, you might be dealing with many techs but going with someone call through something that he/she could have opened documentation and waiting for you to answer: What is a terraform provider, please be specific ? seriously! it is big name but actually happy to not be there as seems being part of limited zone where : If you do not know by heart! you fail and do not join... I have been in other big companies interviews where it goes very structured, focused on the role from different aspects and not only about if you know chef you are in..if you do not..sorry.. we are building magic with that !!! Recruiter has flagged to be ready for behavioural questions based on STAR methodology, I think as consultant is quite important part of the interview.. well nothing of that was mentioned ? You feel having an interview with nerdy specific topic where someone is putting questions and answers in paper on simple definitions of such kind.. Old school boring questions that you need to answer fully, specifically and without forgetting any single word of definition: what TLS and how it works ? What HTTPS and how it works and what it happens when you hit google.com ? What is difference between containers and vm ? terraform: what is a provider ? which version you work with (Seriously)? ? how you deploy in different environments ? if you answer, you will be asked to be more specific.. you go specific, you get more specific.. till you gave up.. as on phone explaining a picture where someone is continuously interrupting to go deeper with no sense becomes chaotic.. The interviewer is very keen to show off that you always miss something.. Very bad english that need to ask repeating the question multiple times.. Some questions are going very generic.. whatever you answer, the interviewer seems glad to mention that you are out of context…. do not worry will be skipped.. I am very surprised that interview goes that way without any single study case or round table on customer facing situation, I feel someone just printed a question form he/she likes and jump on a call.. apprenticing things by heart to satisfy an interviewers ears, is not something to evaluate people! Small note: I have been asked how DNS works: I answered briefly.. It was not enough as expected… When I asked ‘Well maybe you could remind me that how it works in more details…’… Moment of silence followed by the interviewer reciting a web page and guiding me though the sections of deep DNS functions etc.. It sounds cool as company but not real great impression so far.. won’t apply again…