I applied to Cloudera after a recruiter from the company reached out to me. The interview consisted of multiple stages:

• Phone screening with the recruiter: This was a quick introduction of my career, a discussion of open positions that might be interesting to me, and salary expectations.
• Online test via Hackerrank: I had to complete three tasks with increasing difficulty in one hour. I could freely choose the language I used; I chose Python.
• Two rounds of on-site interviews:
  • The first round was with two members of the team and included programming and technical questions.
  • The second round was with my manager and a team member. It involved further technical questions with greater difficulty (as they phrased it, they were trying to push me to my limits), followed by discussions about the company and my future position with my manager.

I applied to a position related to Kubernetes and infrastructure, so the technical questions were mainly based around basic programming skills, Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, and computer networks. I can't remember all the questions they asked, but I've added the ones I can recall.

Imagine a two-person game. There are coins of different values placed on a table in a row, like this:

20, 5, 10, 50, 10, 5

The players take turns, and in each turn, a player can pick up one coin from either end of the row. The game is played until every coin is picked up by a player. The player with the most money wins.

Write an algorithm for the game in Python that can calculate the sum of money it has at the end of the game, given that it plays with an optimal strategy.

Questions related to Python:

• Explain decorators.
• What are the keywords in Python that can modify a variable's visibility?
• What is a fixture in pytest?

Questions related to Docker and Kubernetes (there were a lot of questions I can't remember):

• You are given a Linux command prompt. How can you determine if you are inside a container?
• Explain layers.
• You are trying to stop a running container and after issuing the command, the container only stops with a significant delay (~30s). What could be the problem?
• Explain the inner workings of Kubernetes services.