Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Configuration Management
This area evaluates your capability to provision and manage cloud infrastructure reliably, repeatably, and securely. UKG relies on declarative automation to maintain consistency across development, staging, and production environments.
You must demonstrate a thorough understanding of state management, resource dependency mapping, and modular design. The engineering team looks for patterns of clean, reusable code that avoids hardcoded values and properly leverages variables and outputs.
Be ready to go over:
- Terraform State Management – How to handle remote state locking, state migration, and resolving state drift.
- Targeted Applies – Understanding the mechanics of targeting specific resources using the
-target flag and why this should be used with extreme caution in production.
- Ansible Secrets Management – Implementing secure configuration parameters using tools like Ansible Vault, environment variables, or external secret managers.
- Configuration Drift – Strategies for identifying and reconciling discrepancies between defined code and actual live infrastructure configurations.
Advanced concepts (less common):
- Designing custom Terraform providers to interact with proprietary APIs.
- Developing dynamic inventories in Ansible to manage highly ephemeral cloud workloads.
Example scenarios:
- "You need to update a single security group rule in a production environment managed by Terraform without risk of modifying or recreating other resources in the state file. How do you execute this?"
- "Explain how you would structure an Ansible playbook to deploy a multi-tier application while ensuring database credentials are never exposed in plaintext within your code repository."
CI/CD, Automation, & Scripting
Automation is the core engine of the DevOps Engineer role at UKG. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to construct secure, efficient, and self-healing deployment pipelines that empower development teams to release software with confidence.
You will be asked to demonstrate practical scripting skills, typically using Bash or Python. The focus is on writing readable, maintainable, and robust scripts that handle errors gracefully and provide clear logging.
Be ready to go over:
- GitHub Actions (GHA) Workflows – Designing multi-stage pipelines, managing runners, caching dependencies, and parallelizing job execution.
- Shell Scripting Foundations – Text processing, file manipulation, error handling (
set -e, set -o pipefail), and exit codes.
- Python Automation – Leveraging libraries and SDKs to interact with cloud APIs, parse complex data formats (JSON, YAML), and automate operational tasks.
- Pipeline Security – Managing build-time secrets, minimizing runner permissions, and scanning container images for vulnerabilities during the build phase.
Advanced concepts (less common):
- Setting up and scaling self-hosted, ephemeral GitHub Actions runners dynamically based on queue depth.
- Implementing advanced deployment patterns like canary or blue-green releases directly within CI/CD pipelines.
Example scenarios:
- "Write a shell script that monitors a specific directory for new log files, parses them for 'ERROR' strings, and sends a summary payload to a webhook if a threshold is exceeded."
- "Why do we choose GitHub Actions over traditional, self-hosted CI servers, and how do you optimize a GHA workflow to reduce build times for a large microservice application?"
Cloud Platforms & Container Orchestration
At UKG's scale, managing applications requires deep expertise in cloud infrastructure and container orchestration. This evaluation area tests your ability to design, secure, and maintain workloads running on platforms like GCP or AWS and managed by Kubernetes.
Interviewers want to see that you understand container lifecycle management, network isolation, and microservices communication patterns.
Be ready to go over:
- Kubernetes Architecture – Pod scheduling, service networking, configmaps, secrets, and ingress controllers.
- Dockerfile Optimization – Writing efficient, secure, and multi-stage Docker builds to minimize attack surfaces and speed up deployment times.
- Cloud Networking – VPC configuration, subnetting, routing tables, NAT gateways, and firewall rules in GCP or AWS.
- Resource Management – Defining CPU and memory requests and limits for containerized applications to prevent resource starvation.
Advanced concepts (less common):
- Implementing custom resource definitions (CRDs) and operators in Kubernetes to automate complex application lifecycles.
- Configuring service meshes (such as Istio) to manage microservice-to-microservice communication, traffic splitting, and mutual TLS (mTLS).
Example scenarios:
- "Walk through the configuration of a Dockerfile for a Go or Node.js application, explaining how you ensure the final image is secure and lightweight."
- "A pod in your Kubernetes cluster is failing with a
CrashLoopBackOff error. Describe your step-by-step process for diagnosing and resolving the underlying issue."
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