Technical hiring for infrastructure teams
See how engineers solve real production problems.
Hands-on technical assessments and expert-led interviews for Kubernetes, DevOps, Platform Engineering, SRE, Cloud and AI infrastructure roles.
- Real-world troubleshooting labs
- Experienced technical interviewers
- Structured, evidence-based evaluation
Task
Checkout cannot reach payments by name. Restore service discovery and prove it from a Pod.
Resources
- deploy/checkout2/2
- deploy/payments3/3
- deploy/coredns0/2
- svc/paymentsClusterIP
candidate@lab:~$ kubectl -n kube-system get deploy coredns
NAME READY UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE coredns 0/2 2 0
candidate@lab:~$ kubectl -n kube-system logs deploy/coredns
plugin/forward: not a valid IP address: "8.8.8.8."
candidate@lab:~$ kubectl -n kube-system edit cm coredns
Evaluation checks
runs on submit
- Upstream forwarding preserved
- CoreDNS Pods ready
- Name resolves from a Pod
- No unrelated changes
The problem
Traditional interviews rarely show how someone handles an outage.
Infrastructure work is investigative. The useful signal is how a candidate narrows down a fault, what they change, and how they prove it is fixed.
Our approach
Put candidates in a controlled environment with a real fault, record what they do, check the result automatically, then discuss their decisions with an experienced engineer.
Answers can be memorised
Good interview answers do not show whether someone can find the fault in a live system.
Coding tests miss infrastructure work
Algorithm puzzles say little about debugging DNS, a failed rollout or a node that will not join.
Senior engineers lose hours
Your most experienced people spend interview time screening candidates who are not yet a fit.
Panels are hard to compare
Different interviewers ask different questions and score them differently.
AI changed the job
Engineers now work alongside AI tools. Judgement, verification and reasoning matter more than recall.
Assessment solutions
Three ways to evaluate infrastructure engineers
Use practical labs, expert interviews, or both. Each produces evidence your hiring team can review and compare.
Hands-on Technical Assessments
Candidates work in a controlled technical environment with a deliberately broken system. They investigate, fix and validate it the way they would on the job.
Example tasks
- Diagnose a CrashLoopBackOff
- Fix a Service that cannot reach its Pods
- Investigate CoreDNS failures
- Resolve Pending Pods and scheduling constraints
- Troubleshoot RBAC permission errors
- Diagnose a failed CI/CD pipeline
- Investigate Terraform state problems
- Analyse observability gaps
- Diagnose GitOps reconciliation issues
- Investigate Linux resource pressure
Expert-led Live Technical Interviews
A qualified engineer runs a structured interview covering practical knowledge, troubleshooting method, architecture decisions and communication.
- Predefined interview structure
- Role-specific questions
- Scenario-based troubleshooting
- Follow-ups based on answers
- Technical scorecards
- Written feedback and recommendation
Combined Assessment + Live Interview
- 1Candidate completes a hands-on assessment.
- 2Your hiring team reviews results and technical activity.
- 3An expert runs a focused live interview on what they did.
- 4You receive one consolidated evaluation report.
Technology coverage
Built around the stack infrastructure teams actually run
Every area below is covered in expert-led interviews. Kubernetes and security come with 33 ready-made hands-on labs, from junior to architect level; for every other area we tailor hands-on labs to your stack.
Kubernetes & Platform Engineering
Expert interviews · Ready-made hands-on labs
Kubernetes · Helm · Rancher · EKS · Cluster lifecycle · Networking · Storage · RBAC · GitOps · Argo CD · Flux
Cloud & Infrastructure
Expert interviews · Hands-on labs tailored to your stack
AWS · Azure · GCP · Terraform · Terragrunt · Ansible · Infrastructure automation
DevOps & CI/CD
Expert interviews · Hands-on labs tailored to your stack
Jenkins · GitHub Actions · GitLab CI · Container builds · Deployment strategies · Release engineering
SRE & Observability
Expert interviews · Hands-on labs tailored to your stack
SLIs & SLOs · Incident response · Prometheus · Grafana · Loki · VictoriaMetrics · Alerting
Linux & Networking
Expert interviews · Hands-on labs tailored to your stack
Linux troubleshooting · DNS · TCP/IP · systemd · Performance analysis · Container runtimes
Cloud-native Security
Expert interviews · Ready-made hands-on labs
Kubernetes security · RBAC · Workload security · Supply chain · Policy enforcement · Secrets
AI & AI Infrastructure
Expert interviews · Hands-on labs tailored to your stack
LLM deployment · GPU-enabled Kubernetes · Model serving · Inference infrastructure · RAG fundamentals · AI-assisted SRE
Labs built around your stack
Any ready-made lab can be adapted, and we build new ones around your own tools, conventions and the incidents your team really sees.
Request a tailored labHow it works
From open role to evidence-based decision
No accounts or setup for your team. Tell us the role; we handle the environment, the interviewer and the report.
- 01
Choose the role and level
Tell us the position, seniority and the technologies that matter to your team.
- 02
Assign a lab or book an expert
We match practical assessments, a live interviewer, or both, to that role.
- 03
Candidate completes it
They use a private link in the browser. No installation and no shared credentials.
- 04
Review the evidence
Scores, check results, command history, interviewer feedback and a clear recommendation.
Sample lab
Step through a Kubernetes troubleshooting lab
A scripted walkthrough of one candidate's approach. It runs in your browser only and is not connected to a cluster.
A production application cannot resolve an internal service name
The frontend in the shop namespace started failing after a configuration change. Restore name resolution, keep the change minimal, and prove it works from the affected workload.
What a reviewer sees
Press “Run next command” to step through one candidate’s approach.
Automated checks
pending
- CoreDNS Pods are Ready
- Service name resolves from the shop namespace
- Corefile still forwards to upstream resolvers
- No unrelated workloads modified
candidate@lab:~$
Why teams work with us
Assessments designed by people who run production platforms
We evaluate the reasoning, decisions and validation behind a result, not just the result. We do not claim to detect every use of AI tools; we design tasks where judgement shows.
Engineering-led design
Scenarios come from real operational incidents, not textbook questions.
Practical over trivia
Candidates fix real faults and prove the fix, rather than recite definitions.
Role-specific rubrics
Different expectations for junior, senior and lead-level engineers.
Human expertise + automated checks
Automated validation where it is reliable, expert judgement where it matters.
Transparent evidence
Check results, command history and interviewer notes you can review yourself.
Your stack, your scenarios
Custom labs and interview plans aligned to the technologies you run.
Managed engineering services
Build, operate, and improve your cloud-native platform.
Practical engineering support for Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability and SRE.
Kubernetes & Platform Engineering
Cluster builds, upgrades, multi-tenancy and day-2 operations.
DevOps & CI/CD Automation
Pipelines, GitOps delivery and infrastructure as code.
SRE & Observability
Monitoring, alerting, SLOs and incident response practice.
AI Infrastructure & LLM Operations
GPU-enabled Kubernetes and self-hosted model serving.
Make your next engineering hire with confidence.
Tell us about the role. We will suggest the right mix of labs and interviews.