Applied through an agency and received a call from the hiring manager after two months. There were three rounds of phone screening: one manager interview and two technical rounds with team members.

I. Manager Interview

The manager interview was straightforward, focusing on the resume, job requirements, and company overview. Questions included:

• How familiar are you with Java/J2EE, including reading, writing, and understanding programs?
• Give an example of a recent problem you encountered and how you solved it.
• What is the difference between the heap and the stack in relation to garbage collection?

II. Technical Rounds (Two Rounds)

These rounds focused on Linux administration, performance, Java, and general work-related questions.

1st Round:

• Why Cloudera, and what makes Hadoop interesting to you?
• How comfortable are you with Linux troubleshooting?
• What is the difference between the su and sudo commands?
• How would you find a specific exception within a directory, its subdirectories, and all files?
• What configuration files have you used in /etc?
• What commands do you use to monitor system performance in Linux (CPU, I/O, memory, etc.)?
• How would you find which process is listening on a specific port?
• When writing a shell script, what is the first line you typically include?
• Are you familiar with the /proc file system?
• How do you obtain thread dumps and heap dumps in Java?
• How familiar are you with identifying problematic code based on an exception stack?
• Have you ever used Git?
• How familiar are you with JDBC/SQL queries/databases?
• Tell me about a difficult customer you dealt with recently.

2nd Round:

• Cloudera primarily uses Java and Linux. How much Python have you worked with?
• Describe a performance problem you dealt with recently.
• If a 10-year-old asked what LDAP is, how would you explain it in a paragraph, including its purpose and why it's important?
• Have you had experience working with Kerberos?
• What are the key components and concepts of SAML?
• Have you used Hadoop technologies previously?
• What are the core concepts of HDFS?
• What cluster file system types have you used in the past?
• What is NFS, and what are hard and soft mounts?
• How can you find a list of Java processes and their PIDs?
• If a PID has two processes, what is the second process?
• Explain child/parent process interaction.
• How do you handle zombie processes, and how do you kill them?
• What are the different types of signals (e.g., SIGHUP, SIGKILL)?
• What does kill -3 pid do?
• How do you troubleshoot heap dump-related problems?
• How do you troubleshoot Java core dumps/thread dumps, and how do you identify blocked threads?
• How would you explain a thread to a non-programmer, and what is a process?
• From a system administrator's perspective, how would you prevent someone from running a specific program?
• How do you find where users or groups are defined?
• Do you recall the OSI model and its seven layers? How is data interchanged between layers?
• When you type a web URL and press Enter, what are the different steps that occur?
• How does a browser find the resource for a URL like www.aaa.com?
• How does name resolution happen?
• What is an API?
• What is a RESTful web service?
• Have you used JMX for performance monitoring?
• How do you handle political or social aspects of issues with customers, and provide an example of how you managed such a situation recently?

Random questions...

Mostly system administration and Java related.