The interview process began with a 30-minute conversation with a recruiter, followed by a 30-minute technical interview with a manager from a different team. I never had the opportunity to speak with the hiring manager.

The technical interview was unusual. Questions were posed such as, "Since you worked on AWS KMS, tell me what kind of authentication and authorization mechanism you would use for a bunch of services interacting with each other." AWS KMS is not directly related to authentication or authorization. I am uncertain if these were intended as trick questions, if there were language barriers, or if the interviewer struggled to formulate clear questions.

I was rejected after this interview. When I asked the recruiter for specifics, I never received a response.

• When were you introduced to DevOps? The recruiter couldn't define what DevOps was for them. The question wasn't just about tools (which is good), but it felt that DevOps as a principle of automating everything and providing infrastructure to development teams wasn't the expected answer.

• There was a question about data processing pipelines. My understanding was that it was about using SQL vs. NoSQL databases for storing data, but I could be wrong.

• The question was about the preferable authentication and authorization mechanism for a group of services interacting with each other. During that question, I think the interviewer mentioned OAuth. I have a feeling that my answer about JWT tokens was not satisfactory. However, OAuth is not ideal for services interacting with each other; it is more for a user to grant a service access to their data in another service, but the interviewer didn't mention such user-service interactions.