



We are VirtusLab – a rapidly developing software engineering company. We offer services spanning from cloud infrastructure to reactive systems and data science. We also invest in R&D and provide substantial support to the IT community by organising conferences, meetup groups, and contributing to open source efforts.
I’m Bartek Antoniak, a Space Owner of the Cloud area at VirtusLab. You will probably meet me during the recruitment process 😉. I wanted to share this article to help you understand who we are, what we value, and so you feel well-prepared for your interview.
In this text, we’ll shed light on Cloud Engineering interviews at VirtusLab. Not necessarily focusing on the process, which is pretty much standard compared to other companies. Instead, we’ll show you how we evaluate our candidates, the cloud engineering abilities required and how to prepare for the interview. To some degree, it applies to everyone from junior to principal roles. Don’t be discouraged if something is completely new to you. We design interviews to reduce formalism and unlock your potential by having friendly conversations.
Everything starts with understanding your work ethic. We have identified the key aspects that help us navigate during the interview meeting.
When it comes to the technical side of things, some principles remain the same regardless of the current technology stack. Instead of walking through the typical checklist, we ask a lot of open-ended questions in areas of:
This approach helps us open more room for discussion outside of the current project space.
This part is all about exploratory problems. Besides understanding the underlying technology, we need to consider limitations and find optimal solutions. Reaching the very end of the problem is not important. We’d rather get the impression if it was good working with you. Some of the things worth considering:
The first task is more dev oriented, for candidates who prefer solution design work and should deeply understand the cloud-native technology landscape.
Propose an architecture and technology to solve inter-service communication problems (high latency, complexity, different standards of exposing endpoints) at scale. Take into consideration the following aspects:
Stretch goal: extend this model to multi-cloud environments Azure/AWS/GCP.
The next task is more suitable for Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) and operations roles. As well as for DevOps Engineer working closely with application teams on automating some workflows.
Propose a high-level design for incident management workflow in Azure/AWS/GCP for a large number of microservices (100+). Take into consideration the following aspects:
Additionally, try to answer the following questions:
Stretch goal: extend this model to multi-cloud environments Azure/AWS/GCP.
Most candidates who fail the interview do so because their understanding of the technology landscape is very shallow. They reason about single technology without trying to understand the problem space first.
We do not expect you to qualify for all of the above points. A good understanding of some of these areas and a willingness to develop expertise in others are sufficient. We are not concerned with your education or any other formalism. What we are concerned with are your passion, knowledge and experience.
Thank you for taking the time to read our article. If you find it interesting, we are more than happy to talk with you.
Check out our recent cloud vacancies (September 2022):