125+ interview questions curated from real interviews at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, Meta, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs. All answers grounded in the zen-pharma project — answer every question with "In our project, we..."
| File | Topic | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| 01-terraform.md | Terraform & IaC | 45 |
| 02-eks-kubernetes.md | EKS & Kubernetes | 24 |
| 03-cicd-github-actions.md | CI/CD & GitHub Actions | 18 |
| 04-gitops-argocd.md | GitOps & ArgoCD | 23 |
| 05-security-devsecops.md | Security & DevSecOps | 25 |
| 06-vpc-networking-aws.md | VPC, Networking & AWS | 18 |
| 07-behavioral-realtime.md | Behavioral & Real-Time | 19 |
| 08-observability-logging-monitoring.md | Observability — Logging & Monitoring | 24 |
| 09-live-troubleshooting-labs.md | Live Troubleshooting Labs — break it, investigate it, fix it | 7 |
| Total | 203 |
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| IaC | Terraform 1.10, S3 backend with native locking |
| Cloud | AWS us-east-1: EKS 1.33, RDS PostgreSQL 15.7, ECR, Secrets Manager |
| Kubernetes | NGINX Ingress, External Secrets Operator, Kyverno, Prometheus/Grafana |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions (reusable workflows), GitHub OIDC, ArgoCD |
| Security | CodeQL, Semgrep, OWASP Dep Check, Trivy, Cosign/Sigstore |
| GitOps | zen-gitops → Helm charts → ArgoCD → EKS namespaces (dev/qa/prod) |
| Observability | Fluent Bit (DaemonSet) → Elasticsearch (Elastic Cloud); kube-prometheus-stack (Prometheus/Grafana/Alertmanager) |
- Always use project context. "In our zen-pharma project, we do X because Y" beats a theoretical answer every time.
- Know the flow end-to-end. The most common opener: "Walk me through how code gets to production." Practice this until it's 90 seconds, fluent, with specific tool names.
- Know your numbers. Dev environment cost ~$160/month. RDS PITR window: 35 days. ArgoCD poll interval: 3 minutes. EKS node count: 3 × t3.small. These details signal real experience.
- Behavioral questions: Use the STAR format (Situation → Task → Action → Result). Reference specific incidents from
07-behavioral-realtime.md. - When you don't know something: Say "I haven't used that specific tool, but the concept maps to X which we use in our project — in X, the way to handle this is..." Never just say "I don't know."
Questions consolidated from:
- zen-infra — Terraform, VPC, EKS, RDS, CI/CD scenarios
- zen-pharma-backend — DevSecOps pipeline, microservices CI
- zen-gitops — ArgoCD, GitOps promotion, External Secrets, incident response
- zen-pharma-frontend — React UI, Node.js build pipeline