I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Hatch Innovations Canada in May 2025
Interview
A DevOps engineer interviewed me after I completed a coding exercise on CoderPad.
The interview began with a brief self-introduction, but the rest of the time was spent with the interviewer rapidly asking a series of technical questions—most of which seemed to be pulled directly from online sources. The questions were mostly very general and covered a wide range of topics.
The interviewer sometimes appeared impatient while listening to my responses and seemed dissatisfied. When I asked for clarification on a few questions, it felt like the interviewer might not fully understand them himself.
Toward the end, I asked about the tech stack and tried to learn more about the team, only to find out that the interviewer was from a different team and had little to no knowledge about the tech stack used by the target team.
Overall, I did not enjoy the interview process. In terms of difficulty, it didn’t feel appropriate for a DevOps Engineer role. If a candidate were able to answer all of those questions confidently, I’d say they either memorized them beforehand or are truly a highly experienced Senior or Staff-level engineer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. How do you ensure the security of a production Kubernetes cluster?
2. How do you prevent privilege escalation?
3. How do you ensure the security of a VPC?
4. How do you ensure security and integrity when deploying images to Kubernetes?
5. What are the best practices for writing a Dockerfile?
6. How do you design a scalable cloud application?
7. How do you refactor a monolithic application into microservices?
8. How do you implement cost optimization in the cloud?
9. How do you solve conflicts?
10. How do you ensure security of IAM roles?
11. How do you manage code to enable effective team collaboration?
