Platform Engineer Interview Process

📞 Intro Call with Talent Partner

First off, you'll speak with a member of our Talent team to explore how your skills and experience align with the requirements for this role. It's also a chance for you to ask questions about the role and Attest more generally, so please have a think beforehand if there's anything you'd like to find out!

Stage 1

🏢 Values Interview

Who?

An engineer and an Engineering Manager. 1 Hour, broken down as 5 mins intros, 40-45 mins questions from us, about 10-15 mins left at the end for you to ask questions about Attest/the role/the team

What?

The purpose of this interview is to evaluate whether the values of you, the candidate, and the values of Attest align. We'll ask a series of questions that allow you to explain how you have demonstrated the following values and approaches: Communication, Accountability, Problem solving, Leadership, Innovation, Transparency, Autonomy.

Stage 2 (2 interviews on the same day with a 15 min break for the candidate)

🏢 Kubernetes pairing task

Who?

1 x platform engineer and 1 backend engineer. 1 Hour.

What?

This is a Kubernetes based pairing exercise for assessing Platform Engineer candidates.

The objective of this exercise is to assess a set of specific qualities in the candidate:

• Communication and pair programming skills.
• The level of rigour in their approach to troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes.

Overview

The general outline is:

1. The candidate is provided with admin privileges to an ephemeral Kubernetes cluster.
2. A functioning service is deployed to the Kubernetes cluster, and it serves requests on a publicly available endpoint.
3. The candidate is allowed 5 minutes to familiarise themselves with the cluster and service.
4. Defects are then introduced to the service, one at a time. Each defect constitutes a scenario.
5. Each scenario presents exactly one defect, and never more.
6. The candidate is asked to identify and fix the defect in each scenario, and articulate why the fix works.

🏢 Problem Design interview

Who?

1 platform engineer + 1 backend or frontend engineer. 1 Hour.

What?

The design stage will be a white boarding and brainstorming exercise. An initial problem will be presented to the candidate, and they will be encouraged to ask as many clarifying questions as they need, and then come up with, and elaborate on, a proposal to solve the problem.

Overview

In this case, the problem to solve is a real life current Attest problem - the instability of the shared dev / QA environment.

Given the problem is a current real life problem, as such there is no ‘right and wrong’ solution. We genuinely want to know the ways that candidates might approach the problem and propose solution(s). We clarify to the candidate that they can change as much as they want but should bear in mind that they are working with a real life problem with all of the constraints that entails.

The format of the interview will be - some proposed solutions to the problem suggested by the candidate, followed by discussions with the interviewers/engineers about the suitability of the solutions, what constraints they might encounter with their solutions, and any other considerations they might want to think about. We will encourage the candidate to look at both incremental ‘real world’ solutions to the problem and also to propose some ‘in an ideal world’ solutions.