Job Requirements

● Over 3-5 years of experience in SRE/Devops role managing production
workloads in AWS
● The expertise of AWS ecosystem (EC2, ECS, S3, VPC, ALB, SG)
● Experience in using Infrastructure as Code (including programming with boto
and using tools like Ansible/Terraform/CloudFormation)
● Problem-solving and communication skills
● Experience in diagnosing and troubleshooting server issued running Linux
● Good understanding of networking (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, SSL/TLS,
Firewalls/WAF, VPN, routing tables etc.)
● Experience in building and deploying applications in Docker containers in
container orchestrators such as ECS, Kubernetes or Docker Swarm
● Experience in monitoring production systems and being proactive to ensure
that outages are limited
● Basic understanding of 12-factor apps

What I went through

Round-1:
General DevOps
I was tested on my skillset/knowledge on DevOps as a horizontal. It was an hour long interview where the interviewer touched base on AWS, networking, security and linux concepts. We did briefly go through my resume and I gave him a brief on the projects I had spearheaded in my previous orgs. Knowing a little over basics in all domains was enough to sail through this round.
Round-2:
Programming
I was already informed that they will be testing my programming skills with Python as the role demanded fluency with the language and would cover a good part of my day to day job.
They picked a module of their open source Python utility Cloudlift and I had to just make things work. The key was to understand what each file is trying to do. Once that was clear, I found it easy to navigate and fill in the blanks, remove bugs. I did add well structured function calls and meaningful comments. Most importantly, I was thinking out loud so that the person on the other side was engaged and could guide me from going into some vague direction.

Round-3:
Hiring Manager
This round turned out to the toughest of them all. I was not expecting this amount of grilling. It started simple. Help your friend(who's a freelance blogger) setup an online presence. At the end of the hour, we were discussing a disaster recovery solution. As mind boggling some questions were, the interviewer did push me to think beyond my regular day on certain pieces like network security. I was absolutely sure this was my last call with them.

I loved the fact that almost every question was a discussion with the panelist & involved real problems.
Also, I did not get questions radically out of the JD pointers. That is something I really appreciate.

Round-4:
HR discussion
After giving me a brief on the company policies and my role/location/etc., I received the offer after ~10days.

I received an offer of 35LPA CTC.

Couple of points:

• They asked for a buyout option without any specific cap since I had a notice period of 60days.
• Calls were scheduled with multiple members of the team I would be joining, biweekly.
• HR team was always a text/call away with any doubts or changes reqeuested.
• Simpl is remote friendly. Also, they do have these all expenses paid WFO weeks.