Katkat
Back

Design and explain infra, K8s, routing, and fleet

LambdaSoftware Engineer · HR Screen
HardSoftware EngineerHR ScreenSystem Design

Last updated

This question evaluates system design and infrastructure engineering skills, including Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD for bare-metal and Kubernetes, secrets management, idempotency and drift control, Kubernetes control-plane and workload management, edge firmware and fleet OTA management, IP routing and troubleshooting, and the ability to demonstrate automation, networking, observability, and security through a homelab. It is commonly asked to assess operational design thinking, scalability, security, reliability, and troubleshooting across distributed systems, falls under the System Design and Platform Engineering domain, and tests both conceptual understanding of control-plane and networking principles and practical application of operational guardrails and rollout strategies.

Walk through your experience with Infrastructure as Code. Describe a reference design for provisioning and updating bare-metal servers and Kubernetes clusters via CI/CD, including secrets management, idempotency, and drift detection. Explain Kubernetes’ reconciliation loop and outline workload management strategies (scheduling, resource requests/limits, quotas, HPA/VPA, cluster autoscaler, and multi-tenancy). Design and operate a firmware/fleet management solution for edge devices covering OTA updates, staged rollouts, rollback, and device health telemetry. Explain how routing tables work (longest-prefix match, static vs. dynamic routing) and how you would troubleshoot blackholes or asymmetric routing. Share your homelab setup and what it demonstrates about your skills.