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Infrastructure Engineer Interview Questions

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Infrastructure Engineer Interview Questions

Infrastructure engineers are responsible for building and maintaining digital networks. In your interview for an infrastructure engineer position, be prepared to answer technical questions about IT systems and software. Interviewers may also ask non-technical questions to assess your communication and time management skills.

Top Infrastructure Engineer Interview Questions & How to Answer

Question 1

Question #1: How do you communicate complex issues to non-engineer colleagues or clients?

How to answer
How to answer: Interviewers use this question to assess your ability to communicate IT information to co-workers and clients from non-IT backgrounds. List and describe the verbal and written communication strategies you have used in the past to break down difficult concepts into understandable pieces.
Question 2

Question #2: What are the positive and negative aspects of working within an Agile construct?

How to answer
How to answer: Agile is one of the most popular project management and software development approaches used by IT teams. This question allows interviewers to assess your understanding of the Agile environment as well as your approach to teamwork and interpersonal communication. If possible, use previous work experience to elaborate on the benefits and issues you have experienced working within an Agile environment.
Question 3

Question #3: How do you produce quality work when you have several projects to complete?

How to answer
How to answer: Infrastructure engineers must juggle all of their projects while simultaneously dealing with infrastructure issues requiring immediate attention. Interviewers use this question to assess your time-management skills and your ability to work well under pressure. List and discuss planning tools you use on the job and how you handle emergency issues.

3,735 infrastructure engineer interview questions shared by candidates

(Second Email Screening Question) The git-daemon implementation that ships in Core Git has never been tuned for high concurrency situations (i.e. situations with thousands of clients performing git-daemon requests on the same machine). A particular source of concern is the way the daemon handles the children of the process. git-daemon stores the the list of live children in a linked list. New children are inserted into the list such that children with the same source address are clustered in the list, and the new child goes at the front of the cluster. As a result of this data structure, all operations regarding children management are extremely inefficient. • Can you spot and explain what are these operations, and what are their current asymptotic costs? This would be incredibly valuable information to have on the commit message for your changes. • How would you change the storage of the live children to make these operations significantly faster? • What are the new asymptotic costs of the implementation? Is it a strict improvement for all operations? Again, this would make great content for your commit messages. • Hint: Git already has a lot of generic data structures available -- you can reuse them instead of writing one from scratch. That should make the job much easier. • Bonus: Can you spot a corner case in the children handling code that would have terrible performance implications? What would be the easiest way to fix it?
avatar

Git Infrastructure Engineer

Interviewed at GitHub

3.6★
Apr 5, 2017

(Second Email Screening Question) The git-daemon implementation that ships in Core Git has never been tuned for high concurrency situations (i.e. situations with thousands of clients performing git-daemon requests on the same machine). A particular source of concern is the way the daemon handles the children of the process. git-daemon stores the the list of live children in a linked list. New children are inserted into the list such that children with the same source address are clustered in the list, and the new child goes at the front of the cluster. As a result of this data structure, all operations regarding children management are extremely inefficient. • Can you spot and explain what are these operations, and what are their current asymptotic costs? This would be incredibly valuable information to have on the commit message for your changes. • How would you change the storage of the live children to make these operations significantly faster? • What are the new asymptotic costs of the implementation? Is it a strict improvement for all operations? Again, this would make great content for your commit messages. • Hint: Git already has a lot of generic data structures available -- you can reuse them instead of writing one from scratch. That should make the job much easier. • Bonus: Can you spot a corner case in the children handling code that would have terrible performance implications? What would be the easiest way to fix it?

(Email Screening Question) Our monitoring shows that one of our fileserver machines is quickly running out of memory. A quick glance at the machine shows that the number of processes is continuously increasing -- it seems like some of the processes are getting stuck and not terminating. Answer the following questions with as much detail as you feel comfortable. Feel free to give written examples of commands to run. 1. How would you find which processes are stuck and which ones are progressing adequately? 2. How would you figure out who is spawning all these processes? 3. Once the processes and their source is understood, how would you debug the actual issue affecting them? 4. How would you mitigate the current situation in the machine to prevent it from falling over?
avatar

Git Infrastructure Engineer

Interviewed at GitHub

3.6★
Apr 5, 2017

(Email Screening Question) Our monitoring shows that one of our fileserver machines is quickly running out of memory. A quick glance at the machine shows that the number of processes is continuously increasing -- it seems like some of the processes are getting stuck and not terminating. Answer the following questions with as much detail as you feel comfortable. Feel free to give written examples of commands to run. 1. How would you find which processes are stuck and which ones are progressing adequately? 2. How would you figure out who is spawning all these processes? 3. Once the processes and their source is understood, how would you debug the actual issue affecting them? 4. How would you mitigate the current situation in the machine to prevent it from falling over?

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