To stand out during your interviews, you must demonstrate mastery in several distinct technical domains. The engineering team at M1 Technology will evaluate your skills through practical discussions and hands-on exercises in these key areas.
Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Platforms
This area evaluates your ability to manage infrastructure programmatically, ensuring environments are reproducible, scalable, and secure. You must show a deep understanding of cloud resource provisioning and architecture.
Be ready to go over:
- Terraform Module Design – How to build reusable, dry, and highly configurable Terraform modules.
- AWS Networking – Designing secure VPC architectures, including public/private subnets, NAT gateways, security groups, and NACLs.
- State Management – Best practices for state locking, remote backends, and handling state drift.
Advanced concepts (less common):
- Multi-region failover configurations and active-active deployments.
- Writing custom Terraform providers or integrating open-source policy-as-code tools like OPA (Open Policy Agent).
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Walk me through how you would structure Terraform code to manage dev, staging, and production environments while minimizing code duplication."
- "How would you design a secure, multi-tier AWS VPC architecture for a backend application that requires database access but must not be exposed to the public internet?"
CI/CD & Container Orchestration
This evaluation area focuses on your ability to build highly efficient pipelines and manage containerized workloads at scale, ensuring rapid feedback loops for developers.
Be ready to go over:
- Pipeline Optimization – Strategies for reducing build and deployment times, such as caching dependencies and parallel execution.
- Kubernetes Core Concepts – Understanding Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingress, and ConfigMaps/Secrets.
- Deployment Strategies – Implementing blue-green, canary, and rolling update deployments.
Advanced concepts (less common):
- GitOps workflows using tools like ArgoCD or Flux.
- Writing custom Kubernetes operators or managing complex Helm charts.
Example questions or scenarios:
- "How would you design a canary deployment strategy for a microservice deployed on a Kubernetes cluster? How do you determine if a rollback is necessary?"
- "Explain how you would integrate automated security scanning (SAST/DAST) into a Jenkins or GitLab CI pipeline without significantly slowing down the build process."
Backend Development & Scripting
As a DevOps Engineer / Backend Developer, you must possess strong software engineering capabilities. This area tests your ability to write clean, efficient code and design robust backend systems.
Be ready to go over:
- API Design – Developing secure, RESTful, or gRPC-based endpoints.
- Scripting & Automation – Writing robust scripts in Python, Go, or Bash to automate complex operational workflows.
- Database Integration – Interfacing backend applications with relational (PostgreSQL) and non-relational databases.
Advanced concepts (less common):
- Concurrency patterns in Go (goroutines/channels) or asynchronous programming in Python.
- Optimizing database queries, indexing strategies, and analyzing execution plans.
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Write a backend service endpoint that processes incoming webhooks, validates the payload, and writes the data to a database while handling potential connection failures gracefully."
- "Describe how you would design an automated cleanup script that identifies and deletes unassociated AWS EBS volumes, ensuring you don't accidentally delete critical data."