Cloud Infrastructure & Networking
You’ll be assessed on how you design, secure, and operate cloud-native services at scale. Expect questions spanning VPC design, subnetting, routing, load balancing, security groups, identity, and cost controls across AWS/Azure/GCP.
Be ready to go over:
- VPC/VNet architecture: CIDR planning, private vs. public subnets, NAT/bastion patterns
- Networking fundamentals: DNS, TLS, HTTP/2, gRPC, L4/L7 load balancing, ingress/egress
- Cloud services: IAM policies/roles, KMS, service accounts, managed databases, queues
- Advanced concepts (less common): Multi-region active-active, service mesh ingress, private link, hybrid connectivity
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Design a secure, multi-AZ architecture for a stateless microservice with external dependencies."
- "How would you diagnose intermittent 502s behind an ingress gateway?"
- "Walk me through least-privilege access for cross-account deployments."
CI/CD, Containers & Infrastructure as Code
Interviewers will probe your ability to build fast, reliable pipelines and immutable, reproducible infrastructure. They care about standards, testability, rollback strategies, and developer experience.
Be ready to go over:
- CI/CD tooling: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Argo CD, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary)
- Containers & orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes primitives, Helm/Kustomize, autoscaling, resource tuning
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform modules, state management, drift detection, policy-as-code (OPA)
- Advanced concepts (less common): Progressive delivery, supply-chain security (SBOM, signing), multi-cluster GitOps
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Design a pipeline that promotes artifacts across environments with automated gates."
- "Explain how you’d implement canary releases on Kubernetes with safe rollbacks."
- "Show how you’d structure Terraform for multi-region reuse and guardrails."
Reliability, Observability & Incident Response
Expect detailed discussions about SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, tracing, alerting, and how you reduce operational burden. You’ll be evaluated on production judgment, prioritization, and learning loops after incidents.
Be ready to go over:
- SLIs/SLOs/error budgets: Choosing meaningful signals, tuning alerts, on-call hygiene
- Telemetry stack: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, tracing in microservices
- Incident management: Runbooks, escalation, postmortems, chaos testing, game days
- Advanced concepts (less common): Capacity modeling, load shedding, circuit breakers, backpressure
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Define SLIs/SLOs for an API and map alerting to customer impact."
- "You’ve got a latency spike after a new release—walk your diagnostic steps."
- "How do you turn a recurring 3 a.m. page into a lasting reliability fix?"
Security, Compliance & Governance
Security is embedded in engineering at Adobe. Interviewers will test how you integrate security controls into build and run phases without slowing delivery.
Be ready to go over:
- Identity & access: IAM, RBAC, SSO/OIDC, secrets management, key rotation
- Secure SDLC: SAST/DAST, dependency scanning, image hardening, vulnerability management
- Compliance: Audit trails, change approvals, data protection patterns, least privilege
- Advanced concepts (less common): Zero trust networking, workload identity, runtime security, policy-as-code
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Design a secret management strategy for multi-tenant Kubernetes."
- "How would you enforce image signing and provenance in CI/CD?"
- "Describe how you’d prepare for a compliance audit across multiple environments."
Scripting, Automation & Practical Coding
You will likely write code—shell, Python, or a language of your choice—to automate tasks, integrate APIs, or manipulate infrastructure. The bar is clean, maintainable, and idempotent automation that others can run.
Be ready to go over:
- Languages: Bash, Python, or a comfortable language for you; code quality and testing
- Automation: Idempotent scripts, retries/backoff, pagination, error handling, logging
- APIs/SDKs: Cloud provider SDKs, GitHub/GitLab APIs, Kubernetes client libraries
- Advanced concepts (less common): Event-driven automation, operators/controllers, policy enforcement hooks
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Implement a script to rotate credentials and update dependent services safely."
- "Parse logs to surface top error patterns and emit metrics."
- "Trigger a canary rollout via API and verify health checks before promotion."