DevOps interview sprint
Four weeks to interview-ready: SRE craft, Kubernetes, CI/CD at scale, and infra system design.
A rigorous 30-day DevOps and SRE interview sprint for top-tier product companies — the bar used at hyperscale teams where reliability, velocity, and judgment matter more than tool trivia. Covers Linux, networking, release engineering, Kubernetes, IaC, observability, incidents, infra system design, and behavioral loops. Pair with a regional elective when you need visa sponsorship guidance.
Who this is for: Platform, DevOps, and SRE candidates targeting senior product-company loops who want a daily plan instead of scattered tutorials.
- Execute a four-week schedule aligned to hyperscale interview loops
- Whiteboard CI/CD, Kubernetes, and infra system design with trade-offs
- Pass behavioral and on-call scenarios with SRE-grade clarity
Regional electives, shared foundations, and sibling sprints — pick what matches your target role.
lessons
- 1 Week 0: Your 30-day battle plan Hyperscale interview loops, daily schedule, and what bar-raisers actually score.
- 2 Week 1, Day 1–2: Linux & shell at production scale Debug like on-call: processes, I/O, networking, and the commands you live-debug with.
- 3 Week 1, Day 3: Git & release discipline at scale Trunk-based flow, monorepo awareness, and PR hygiene that hyperscale teams expect.
- 4 Week 1, Day 4–5: Networking & HTTP for platform engineers DNS, TLS, L4/L7 load balancing, and the path a request takes at scale.
- 5 Week 1 checkpoint: foundations + scripting drill Linux, Git, networking, and a timed scripting exercise.
- 6 Week 2, Day 1: CI/CD & release engineering at scale Pipeline stages, DORA metrics, progressive delivery, and safe rollouts.
- 7 Week 2, Day 2–3: Release engineering — GitHub Actions & GitOps YAML pipelines, environments, OIDC, and GitOps patterns used at scale.
- 8 Week 2, Day 4: Docker & container hardening Multi-stage builds, least privilege, and runtime security interview answers.
- 9 Week 2, Day 5: Kubernetes production essentials Workloads, scheduling, networking, and rollouts at scale.
- 10 Week 2 checkpoint: ship a portfolio pipeline CI/CD, containers, and Kubernetes in one demo-ready artifact.
- 11 Week 3, Day 1–2: Terraform & infrastructure as code State, modules, blast radius, and IaC interview scenarios.
- 12 Week 3, Day 3: Cloud platform engineering at scale IAM, compute, networking, and the services you map in design rounds.
- 13 Week 3, Day 4: Config, secrets & twelve-factor at scale Environment parity, rotation, and dynamic config without secret sprawl.
- 14 Week 3, Day 5: Supply chain security & shift-left Pipeline security gates, SBOM, signing — expected at top-tier bar.
- 15 Week 3 checkpoint: infra design mock Terraform, cloud platform, and a timed infra system design.
- 16 Week 4, Day 1: Observability & SLO interview mastery Metrics, logs, traces, SLIs/SLOs, and alerting that respects sleep.
- 17 Week 4, Day 2: Incident command & blameless learning Mitigate first, communicate clearly, improve systems — on-call bar.
- 18 Week 4, Day 3: Behavioral & leadership principles STAR stories mapped to ownership, customer impact, and technical disagreement.
- 19 Week 4, Day 4: Full-loop mock drills Pipeline design, K8s debug, infra design, scripting — timed.
- 20 Week 4, Day 5: Final checklist & interview day Cheat sheet, calm execution, and loop strategy.
- 21 Complete reference guide & pass checklist Quizzes, labs, design prompts, and final audit before you schedule loops.