Engineering manager backend interview questions

As asked

Your team runs mixed workloads on an OCI Kubernetes Engine cluster: low-latency API pods that must never be co-located with batch jobs, and batch pods that should prefer spot nodes. Walk me through how you would configure Kubernetes scheduling to enforce these constraints, and what happens when the scheduler cannot satisfy them.

Sample answer outline

A strong answer covers taints and tolerations to repel batch pods from API nodes, node affinity and anti-affinity rules, PodAntiAffinity to spread API replicas across failure domains, Priority Classes and PodDisruptionBudgets to protect latency-critical workloads from eviction, and using OCI node pool labels to route batch jobs to spot-instance pools. The candidate should explain what the scheduler does when a pod cannot be placed (Pending state and events), and how to debug with kubectl describe pod.

Expect these follow-ups

• How do you ensure batch pods do not starve on a cluster where spot nodes are frequently reclaimed?
• What are the risks of using required versus preferred affinity rules and how do you decide which to use?

As asked

A large enterprise customer is setting up OCI for the first time with 200 developers across 8 product teams. Each team should have full access to their own OCI compartment but zero visibility into other teams' resources. Administrators need read access across all compartments for auditing. Walk me through how you would design the compartment hierarchy, groups, and policies to enforce this.

Sample answer outline

A strong answer describes using OCI compartments as the primary isolation boundary, creating one compartment per team under a root tenancy compartment, using groups tied to the team's identity domain, writing IAM policies scoped to each compartment, a read-only admin group with policies at the root compartment that inherit down, and using tag-based access controls for resource-level granularity. The candidate should note how OCI policy inheritance works and the difference between manage, use, read, and inspect verbs.

Expect these follow-ups

• How do you handle a developer who needs temporary elevated access to another team's compartment for an incident?
• How would you audit which policies a given group actually has effective access to, given inheritance?