Your technical interviews will be comprehensive, covering a wide spectrum of modern infrastructure and deployment technologies. Below are the primary areas where you must demonstrate proficiency.
Cloud Platforms & Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
At NIKE, cloud fluency is foundational. You will be evaluated on your ability to design and manage scalable environments primarily in AWS and Azure. Interviewers will look for your expertise in codifying infrastructure so that environments can be spun up reliably and repeatedly. Strong performance here means demonstrating a deep understanding of state management, modularity, and security best practices within your IaC tools.
Be ready to go over:
- Cloud Architecture – Understanding VPCs, IAM roles, load balancing, and multi-region deployments in AWS or Azure.
- Terraform – Managing state files, writing reusable modules, and handling complex resource dependencies.
- Ansible – Writing playbooks for configuration management, managing inventory, and orchestrating multi-tier deployments.
- Advanced concepts (less common) – Multi-cloud networking strategies, custom Terraform providers, and cost-optimization automation.
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Walk me through how you would structure Terraform code for a multi-environment (Dev, Stage, Prod) architecture."
- "How do you securely manage sensitive variables and secrets in your Ansible playbooks?"
- "Describe a scenario where a Terraform deployment failed due to a state lock. How did you resolve it?"
Containerization & Orchestration
Modern applications at NIKE rely heavily on microservices. You must prove your ability to package applications efficiently and manage them at scale. Interviewers will assess your understanding of container lifecycles, resource allocation, and cluster management.
Be ready to go over:
- Docker – Writing optimized Dockerfiles, multi-stage builds, and minimizing image attack surfaces.
- Kubernetes (K8s) – Deploying pods, managing replica sets, configuring ingress controllers, and handling persistent volumes.
- Cluster Administration – Upgrading clusters, managing node pools, and implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
- Advanced concepts (less common) – Writing custom K8s operators, managing service meshes (like Istio), and tuning cluster autoscalers.
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Explain the difference between a Deployment and a StatefulSet in Kubernetes, and when you would use each."
- "How do you troubleshoot a pod that is stuck in a CrashLoopBackOff state?"
- "Describe your approach to managing resource requests and limits across a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster."
CI/CD & Deployment Strategies
Delivering code quickly and safely is the core mandate of a DevOps Engineer. You will be tested on your ability to build robust pipelines that automate testing, security scanning, and deployment. NIKE expects you to be familiar with modern deployment methodologies that minimize downtime.
Be ready to go over:
- Pipeline Architecture – Designing end-to-end workflows using tools like GitHub Actions.
- GitOps – Managing continuous delivery for Kubernetes using tools like ArgoCD.
- Deployment Patterns – Implementing Blue/Green, Canary, and Rolling deployments to ensure zero-downtime releases.
- Advanced concepts (less common) – Creating custom GitHub Actions, managing dynamic environments, and integrating automated rollback triggers.
Example questions or scenarios:
- "How would you design a GitHub Actions workflow to build, test, and deploy a containerized application to Azure?"
- "Explain how ArgoCD handles configuration drift in a Kubernetes environment."
- "Walk me through the steps to implement a Canary deployment for a highly trafficked consumer application."
Observability & Scripting
You cannot manage what you cannot measure. NIKE expects engineers to build proactive monitoring systems and write scripts to automate repetitive tasks. You will be evaluated on your ability to extract meaningful insights from logs and metrics, as well.
Be ready to go over:
- Monitoring & Alerting – Setting up metric collection and actionable alerts using Prometheus and Grafana.
- Log Management – Aggregating, parsing, and querying application and infrastructure logs using the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
- Scripting – Writing robust, error-handling scripts in Python or Shell (Bash) for system administration tasks.
- Advanced concepts (less common) – Distributed tracing, custom Prometheus exporters, and automated incident remediation scripts.
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Write a Python script that interacts with the AWS API to find and delete unattached EBS volumes."
- "How would you configure Prometheus to monitor a custom application metric, and how do you prevent alert fatigue?"
- "Explain your strategy for indexing and querying massive volumes of log data in Elasticsearch without degrading performance."
