1. What is a DevOps Engineer at Akamai?

At Akamai, the role often titled Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or DevOps Engineer places you at the intersection of massive scale and critical internet infrastructure. Akamai is not just a standard cloud company; it is the "edge" that powers and protects life online. You will be contributing to core technology that serves billions of users and routes trillions of requests daily. Whether you are joining the Cloud Security Intelligence group or the Mapping SRE team, your work ensures the internet is fast, reliable, and secure.

This position goes beyond simple deployment pipelines. You are the guardian of availability and performance for distributed systems that control tens of terabits of traffic per second. You will build automation, manage complex Azure environments, and develop internal tooling using Go or Python. You will be responsible for defining Service Level Objectives (SLOs), managing incident responses, and architecting systems that can withstand massive spikes in traffic and sophisticated security threats. If you enjoy solving problems where "latency" and "uptime" are the primary currency, this role offers a unique and high-impact challenge.

2. Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for an interview at Akamai requires a shift in mindset. You are not just being tested on your ability to code or configure a server; you are being evaluated on your understanding of how the internet works at a fundamental level.

Network and System Internals You must possess a deep understanding of Linux internals and networking protocols. Akamai is built on the efficiency of data transmission. Interviewers will expect you to understand TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, and how operating systems handle resources under load. Surface-level knowledge of tools is insufficient; you need to know what happens "under the hood."

Operational Excellence & Problem Solving Demonstrating how you handle failure is critical. You will be evaluated on your approach to troubleshooting complex production incidents. Be prepared to discuss how you use observability tools (like Prometheus or Grafana) to detect errors and how you automate remediation to prevent recurrence.

Automation and Tooling Akamai values engineers who can build their own solutions. You should be comfortable treating infrastructure as code (using Terraform) and writing robust software to support operations. Proficiency in scripting and programming languages like Python or Golang is a key evaluation criterion.

Collaboration and Communication As part of a globally distributed team, often working remotely via the FlexBase program, your ability to articulate technical concepts clearly is vital. You will be assessed on how well you partner with development, QA, and support teams to drive reliability improvements.

3. Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a DevOps/SRE role at Akamai is rigorous but practical. It typically begins with a recruiter screening to discuss your background, interest in the edge/security space, and alignment with the role's logistics. Following this, you will likely face a technical phone screen. This round usually involves a mix of rapid-fire technical questions regarding Linux/Networking and a practical coding or scripting exercise. The focus here is on your ability to write clean, functional code to solve an operational problem, such as parsing logs or interacting with an API.

The final stage is a "virtual onsite" loop consisting of multiple back-to-back interviews. These sessions are split between deep technical dives and behavioral assessments. You can expect specific rounds dedicated to system design, deep troubleshooting (often presenting a broken scenario you must fix), and coding. There is a strong emphasis on real-world scenarios rather than abstract algorithmic puzzles. Interviewers want to see how you think when a system goes down and how you design for resilience.

This timeline illustrates the typical progression from application to offer. Use this to pace your preparation: focus on fundamental scripting and Linux skills for the initial screen, then pivot to complex system design and architectural deep dives for the onsite rounds.

4. Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed, you must demonstrate competency across four main pillars. Akamai interviews are known for drilling down into the "why" and "how" of technologies.

Networking and Linux Internals

Because Akamai is a CDN and security giant, networking is the most critical evaluation area. You must be comfortable discussing the lifecycle of a packet and the intricacies of the Linux kernel.

Be ready to go over:

• Core Networking: TCP/IP model, three-way handshake, flow control, congestion control, and DNS resolution mechanics.
• Linux Fundamentals: Boot process, memory management, process lifecycle, signals, and file descriptors.
• HTTP/HTTPS: Status codes, headers, SSL/TLS handshakes, and caching mechanisms.
• Advanced concepts: BGP routing, Anycast, and kernel tuning for high-performance networking.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "What happens in the Linux kernel when a network packet arrives at the network interface card?"
• "Explain the difference between a process and a thread in Linux."
• "How does a DNS query resolve from a client to an authoritative nameserver?"

Observability and Incident Management

You will be tested on your ability to maintain system health. This involves not just watching dashboards, but defining what should be watched.

Be ready to go over:

• SLIs/SLOs/SLAs: The difference between them and how to define meaningful reliability metrics for a service.
• Monitoring Stack: Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or Loki.
• Troubleshooting: Methodical approaches to debugging high latency, packet loss, or memory leaks in a distributed system.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "A web server is returning 500 errors intermittently. Walk me through your debugging process."
• "How would you design an alert system that minimizes false positives?"
• "Describe a production incident you resolved. What was the root cause, and how did you prevent recurrence?"

Cloud Infrastructure and Automation

Akamai uses Azure heavily, along with containerization technologies. You need to show you can manage infrastructure at scale.

Be ready to go over:

• Container Orchestration: Kubernetes architecture, pod lifecycles, networking (CNI), and troubleshooting crash loops.
• Infrastructure as Code: Managing resources using Terraform or Pulumi.
• CI/CD: Designing pipelines in Jenkins or GitHub Actions to automate testing and deployment.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How do you perform a zero-downtime deployment for a stateful application in Kubernetes?"
• "Write a Terraform configuration to provision a load balancer and a set of backend servers."

Coding and Scripting

Unlike some Ops roles, Akamai requires strong software engineering skills. You will likely code in Python or Go.

Be ready to go over:

• Automation Scripting: Text processing, log parsing, and API interaction.
• Tool Development: Writing CLI tools to assist with operational tasks.
• Data Structures: Usage of maps, lists, and queues in practical scenarios.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a Python script to parse a large log file and count the occurrences of specific IP addresses."
• "Implement a function to check if a service is healthy by hitting its health-check endpoint."

5. Key Responsibilities

As a DevOps Engineer or SRE at Akamai, your daily work directly impacts the stability of the internet. You will be responsible for deploying and maintaining the platforms that support Akamai's security and compute products. This involves creating and managing automation pipelines that support development, testing, and deployment workflows, ensuring that code moves from commit to production safely and efficiently.

Collaboration is a massive part of the role. You will partner with product engineers to advocate for reliable system design, often embedding with teams to help them build "supportability" into their features from day one. You will also participate in on-call rotations. When a service-impacting issue occurs, you are the expert guiding the restoration, followed by driving the post-mortem analysis to ensure the same error doesn't happen twice.

Beyond maintenance, you will act as a builder. You will develop internal tools and prototypes to proactively monitor service performance. Whether it is improving the observability platform to speed up error detection or managing large-scale data environments in Azure or Databricks, your goal is to reduce toil and increase the reliability of systems serving billions of people.

6. Role Requirements & Qualifications

Candidates who thrive at Akamai combine deep systems knowledge with a software engineering mindset.

Must-have skills

• Professional Experience: Typically 2+ years for mid-level and 5+ years for senior roles in SRE, DevOps, or SysAdmin capacities.
• Linux/Unix Mastery: Deep comfort working in a Linux environment, including command-line debugging and kernel concepts.
• Coding Proficiency: Strong experience developing software or scripts using Python, Golang, or Bash.
• Networking Knowledge: In-depth understanding of computer networking (TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS).
• Cloud & Containers: Experience with cloud platforms (specifically Azure is a plus) and container orchestration with Kubernetes and Docker.

Nice-to-have skills

• Observability Tools: Hands-on experience with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
• Big Data Tech: Exposure to tools like Databricks or distributed queues like Kafka/RedPanda.
• Security Clearance: For specific teams (like Government or Security Intelligence), a Secret Security Clearance may be required.
• IaC Tools: Familiarity with Terraform, Ansible, or Salt.

7. Common Interview Questions

The following questions are representative of what candidates face at Akamai. They cover technical depth, system design, and behavioral traits. Note that Akamai interviewers often ask follow-up questions to test the limits of your knowledge.

Networking & Systems

• "Explain the entire process of a DNS lookup from the moment you type a URL until the page loads."
• "What is the difference between TCP and UDP, and when would you use one over the other?"
• "How do you troubleshoot a server that is running out of memory?"
• "Explain the concept of a 'zombie process' in Linux. How do you find and kill it?"
• "What are inodes in a file system, and what happens if you run out of them?"

Coding & Automation

• "Write a script in Python/Go that reads a log file and prints the top 10 most frequent error messages."
• "How would you automate the rotation of SSH keys across 1,000 servers?"
• "Implement a basic rate limiter."
• "Given a list of server IP addresses, write a script to ping them and report which ones are unreachable."

System Design & Reliability

• "Design a distributed log aggregation system for a global fleet of servers."
• "How would you design a system to handle millions of requests per second with low latency?"
• "If you see a spike in 503 errors on the load balancer, what are your first steps?"
• "Define SLIs and SLOs for a REST API service."

Behavioral & Culture

• "Tell me about a time you made a mistake in production. How did you handle it?"
• "Describe a situation where you had a conflict with a developer regarding a deployment timeline."
• "How do you prioritize tasks when you have multiple critical alerts firing at once?"

8. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is this role more "Dev" or "Ops"? Akamai leans heavily toward the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) model. While you need strong operational skills (Linux/Networking), you are expected to solve problems using code (Python/Go) rather than manual intervention. Expect to spend a significant amount of time writing software to automate operations.

Q: What is the remote work policy? Akamai operates under "FlexBase," a global flexible working program. About 95% of employees have the choice to work from home, the office, or a hybrid of both. Most SRE and DevOps roles are fully remote-capable within the country of employment.

Q: How deep do I need to go on networking topics? Deeper than average. Because Akamai is the network for many customers, understanding how the internet functions (BGP, DNS, CDNs) is core to the business. You should review these concepts thoroughly, even if your background is purely application DevOps.

Q: What is the typical team structure? Teams are often cross-functional and distributed globally. You might work with a "Mapping SRE" team focused on traffic routing or a "Network SRE" team focused on the cloud overlay. Collaboration across time zones is common.

Q: Does Akamai use public cloud or their own hardware? Akamai has a massive private infrastructure (the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform) but also heavily utilizes public cloud providers like Azure for internal tooling, data analytics, and specific product lines. Experience with both bare metal and public cloud is valuable.

9. Other General Tips

Brush up on the "Akamai Context" Understand what a Content Delivery Network (CDN) actually does. Read up on how caching works, what "edge computing" means, and the basics of web security (DDoS protection, WAF). Showing you understand Akamai's business model during the technical rounds demonstrates high engagement.

Practice "War Stories"

When asked about past incidents, focus on your specific contribution. Don't just say "we fixed it." Say "I identified the bottleneck in the database, implemented a read-replica, and updated the connection pool config, which reduced latency by 50%."

Don't Ignore the "Why" If you are asked to design a system, explain your trade-offs. Why did you choose a NoSQL database over SQL? Why did you pick a push-based monitoring system over pull-based? Akamai engineers value deliberate decision-making over trend-chasing.

Showcase Your Scripting During coding rounds, prioritize readability and error handling. Operations code needs to be robust. If your script fails when a file is missing, that’s a red flag. Add comments explaining your logic, as maintainability is a key SRE value.

10. Summary & Next Steps

Becoming a DevOps Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer at Akamai is an opportunity to work on the infrastructure that powers the modern internet. The role demands a unique blend of deep systems knowledge, networking expertise, and software engineering capability. You will be challenged to solve problems at a scale that few other companies can match, contributing to security and performance for billions of users.

To succeed, focus your preparation on Linux internals, networking fundamentals (DNS/TCP), and automation coding. Move beyond surface-level definitions and ensure you can explain how systems behave under pressure. Review the principles of SRE—specifically SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets—and be prepared to demonstrate how you apply these concepts to real-world infrastructure.

The compensation data above reflects the base salary range for US-based candidates. Actual offers depend on your specific experience level (e.g., Senior vs. Lead vs. Director) and location. In addition to base salary, Akamai typically offers annual bonuses, equity awards, and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP), making the total compensation package highly competitive.

With focused preparation on the fundamentals and a clear demonstration of your problem-solving abilities, you are well-positioned to join the team. Good luck!