Initial questionaire.
1. Engineering experience
Describe a skill or knowledge you acquired recently that has been impactful for you. Why did you make this investment? What has the outcome been?
What new skill would you like to learn? Why do you think this is important or timely or interesting? Why do you think you will be good at it?
What kinds of software projects have you worked on before? Which operating systems, development environments, languages, databases?
Would you describe yourself as a high quality coder? Why?
Outline your thoughts on open source software development. What is important to get right in open source projects? What open source projects have you worked on? Have you been an open source maintainer, on which projects, and what was your role?
Describe your experience building large systems with many services - web front ends, REST APIs, data stores, event processing and other kinds of integration between components. What are the key things to think about in regard to architecture, maintainability, and reliability in these large systems?
How comprehensive would you say your knowledge of a Linux distribution is, from the kernel up? How familiar are you with low-level system architecture, runtimes and Linux distro packaging? How have you gained this knowledge?
Outline your thoughts on quality in software development. What practices are most effective to drive improvements in quality?
Outline your thoughts on documentation in large software projects. What practices should teams follow? What are great examples of open source docs?
Outline your thoughts on user experience, usability and design in software. How do you lead teams to deliver outstanding user experience?
Outline your thoughts on performance in software engineering. How do you ensure that your product is fast?
Outline your thoughts on security in software engineering. How do you lead your engineers to improve their security posture and awareness?
Outline your thoughts on devops and devsecops. Which practices are effective, and which are overrated?
2. Education
How did you rank in your final year of high school in mathematics? Were you a top student? On what basis would you say that?
How did you rank in your final year of high school, in your home language? Were you a top student? On what basis would you say that?
Please state your high school graduation results or university entrance results, and explain the grading system used. For example, in the US, you might give your SAT or ACT scores. In Germany, you might give your scores out of a grading system of 1-5, with 1 being the best.
Can you make a case that you are in the top 5% in your academic year, or top 1%, or even higher? If so please outline that case. Make reference where possible to standardised testing results at regional or national level, or university entrance results. Please explain any specific grading system used.
What sort of high school student were you? Outside of class, what were your interests and hobbies? What would your high school peers remember you for?
Which university and degree did you choose? What other universities did you consider, and why did you select that one?
Overall, what was your degree result and how did that reflect on your ability? Please help us understand the grading system for your results.
During all of your education years, from high school to university, can you describe any achievements that were truly exceptional?
What leadership roles did you take on during your education? Did you conceive of, and drive to completion, any initiatives outside of your required classwork?
3. Context
Outline your thoughts on the mission of Canonical. What is it about the company's purpose and goals which is most appealing to you? What do you see as risky or unappealing?
Who are Canonical's key competitors, and how should Canonical set about winning?
Why do you most want to work for Canonical?
What products or services do you most want to work on?
What would you most want to change about Canonical?
What gets you most excited about this role?
