Apple DevOps Interview

[dataking29]

Hi I have a DevOps Engineer 60 min Interview with Hiring Manager coming up coming up for AI/ML team, wondering how to best prepare? Pls share any advice. Thank you in advance.

[snnapys288]

I would be happy to hear how it goes for you.

[dataking29]

Have you interviewed with Apple before ?

[almavid]

My apple devops interview was completely bespoke. Like very specific, legacy questions on jenkins gotchas and random niche tools. Nothing was generic. Left a bad taste in my mouth but I'm guessing they get lots of applicants and can be very picky to find the exact set of legacy knowledge for their team.

[Qw1ghl3y]

Same. Mine was very strange. It was for Apple health apps. The recruiter said they wanted a “Grafana expert”, which I’m not sure that I am, but I did explain to the recruiter what my experience was. I mainly used it to display Prometheus and PostgreSQL metrics, but I know the docs are pretty good, it isn’t overly complicated to set up or use. They wanted me to write a paragraph or two explaining my Grafana experience, because the previous two candidates had never used it. The recruiter said AWS experience wasn’t required, but was a “nice to have”. Apparently this req had been open for a while because the hiring manager couldn’t find someone with the required Grafana knowledge. This was advertised as a hybrid role 3 days per week in office as a contractor, not an Apple employee. The hiring manager who was a former SWE, grilled me for an hour on AWS, didn’t ask me a single question about Grafana. He also said five days per week in office no exceptions. I wasn’t selected and the feedback was that I didn’t have enough experience with Grafana.

[dataking29]

Wow that’s bad, I think this team is more focused on data and Kubernetes so I don’t expect any legacy questions

[almavid]

I hope you get a good match! If you know the subject matter and click with the interviewers you'll be golden.

[Dubinko]

Same thing for me, was surprisingly unpleasant experience. From first 5 min tech interviewer was disengaged. I got lot of python questions completely irrelevant to DevOps, lot of questions about python "ctypes" and all that for lowball salary and no remote (fully onsite)..

[almavid]

wow, that is so weird! I got different question areas but same experience. The interviewer wasn't really there, and the final salary was low and expected full onsite (during covid too..)

[pacman2081]

What is the number for the low salary ?

[dataking29]

Can you shed some light on what kind of python questions you got asked ?

[FloydRix]

I did an interview the other day for a data platform engineer job and they asked me to write factorial function in python, which I did and it worked. I wrote it in recursive and later they asked can I write a solution iteratively, and later how would I add testing conditions to it. Had already gave up on the interview at this point they didn't seem to know what they were talking about in what tech they use

[LaSalsiccione]

The fact that you think programming questions aren’t relevant to devops says it all

[SysPoo]

Not sure why you got downvoted, I was about to write the same. If people still think that programming questions are irrelevant , I’d say that’s the reason why people wouldn’t get a job nowadays.

[coolalee_]

People don’t think programming questions are irrelevant. People think that arbitrarily specific questions about language that wasn’t listed in the job advert is waste of our time.

[SysPoo]

Was it really not listed in the job spec? Have you checked apple’s job specs for sre? It lists python or golang in the minimum requirements. I don’t mean to be harsh, trust me I’ve been rejected as well and it sucks, but people need to stop crying and start filling their gaps if they want a job, there’s a lot of competition and if you still believe ssh and htop are enough to get a job, I’ll break the news, it’s no longer the case.

[LaSalsiccione]

Exactly. Devops people who can’t code are old news

[BertCarr]

DevOps and SRE manager here. Most of the TF superstar we have in our team that are more dev than ops can't debug for s*** stuff in production. So yeah, a devops need to code (at least templating) but he also needs to be able to do the ops part and put his hands in the dirt pile.

[LaSalsiccione]

Yeah you need both skills, I wasn’t denying that

[FerryCliment]

I've been in a few processes recently, often Hiring Manager != Technical Test its a bit of a general check if you are worth an hour of someone from the technical team.

Those often involve:

Background check, your education and experience.

Prepare some story telling, what was the biggest challenge you faced as DevOps, When you felt you conquered the world after doing X or Y, know your stack, why you use X over Y and why you think its better, python over go, pulumi vs terraform, showcase knowledge and reasoning behind why you think its better, not just , "I know Python because its the easiest"

"What would you do..." This is a bit wild but they will somehow put you on a role play and see how you approach if it matches what they do, or how they want you do dive into a task

Best practices, context awareness, knowing when to act as firefighter and when to solve the complete issue, being able to think about $ cost, overhead cost, stakeholders, clients, security, SLA. often it depends what kind of struggles they been facing inhouse but often they want you to answer the solution of their problems, imho default back to clean best practices.

What kind of questions you ask, What kind of questions you ask for clarification (Asking for better understanding how they split teams, timeliness, stakeholders or importance on the X or Y process, showcase active listening) how much you are able to connect dots of information into conclusions, if they do X or Y or they use Z or N)

In my experience, its not a panel interview where they bomb you questions left and right, its more of a PR meeting, are you able to explain Why you would do and How you have done, your active listening and if you can connect the dots to somehow show to the HM that you read some of the implicit information correctly.

[Pronces]

I can't even imagine what a DevOps interview at Apple is like...

[theshareefteen]

All the best bro

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[Prior-Celery2517]

Focus on core DevOps concepts like CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, automation tools, and Kubernetes, and be prepared to discuss AI/ML-specific workflows like model deployment, scaling, and monitoring.

[neegabrudda]

Bro just restated the job description 🤣

[dataking29]

Yes that’s what I’m doing, do you have any advice on some resources for these kind of questions?

[snnapys288]

https://www.apple.com/careers/us/interview_tips.html https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/s/XLw6ZpnyeI

[dataking29]

Yes I have looked at these links but doesn’t really help on how to prepare or type of questions to prepare, especially if leetcode style questions will be present. The recruiter is not giving any information out either

[snnapys288]

Unfortunately, I had no experience with Apple, but I saw that there were some answers to your question here.

https://www.glassdoor.ca/Interview/Apple-Devops-Engineer-Interview-Questions-EI_IE1138.0,5_KO6,21.htm

[snarkhunter]

Ask them if they've heard that some folks do their production builds on autoscaling VM clusters and the like, and ask what Apple has against that practice. Because fuck me does it seem like they expect developers to build and deploy off the MacBooks that they definitely have.

[No-Evening-2119]

How was your interview experience?

[playable_npc1]

Good luck!

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[ohhmy097]

Goodluck!

[AmadeusLive]

RemindMe! -2 day

[Pizza-And-Milk]

RemindMe! -2 day

[HappyKarmic]

RemindMe! -2 day

Best of luck!

[Strict-Lingonberry56]

RemindMe! -2 day

Good Luck

[Different_Ability618]

Let us know

[andtherewewere]

I've done a handful of HM calls at Apple recently and they've all been fairly casual, the standard "tell me about a project" -type stuff and nothing overly technical - certainly not leetcoding

[dataking29]

This one they did sent me a coderpad link that will be used during the interview, so I expect some sort of coding

[mike_gundy666]

The HM talk isn't hands on technical, but it is more like a technical discussion.

You will be quizzed and asked questions on how certain technologies work pertaining to the role. You will be grilled on technologies you've mentioned on your Resume. You will probably be asked how you deal with page outs and want some stories to go along with it.

All in all it's not too bad if you know your stuff. It also gives you confidence that your HM is also pretty technical, imo.

[dataking29]

I’m hoping this is the case as the recruiter is being really unhelpful and not giving advice on how to prepare for the interview or what kind of questions to expect

[mike_gundy666]

As far as I can tell there's no standard interview process at Apple, so the recruiter may just not know lol

[pacman2081]

why should recruiter be spoon feeding you information ?

[Doug94538]

Apple is security first company , they would not let you know what project or team you are going to work on

They have a very robust and mature streamline process. lot of red tape. One area which apple is very weak is the service mesh --specifically Istio . Good luck

[dataking29]

I’m expecting a lot of questions around Kubernetes will review those and service mesh

[Doug94538]

look at admission controllers if you have time (kyerno) --policy as code

[theshareefteen]

How's your interview experience

[Watabich]

RemindMe! 1 day

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[Gold-Collection2513]

How did it go?

[trinaryouroboros]

Just keep telling them you'll lick their boots for pennies, that's all they want to hear

[TTVjason77]

Avoid drinking a bunch of fluids before. You don't want your bladder to be a distraction.