NetApp | Site Reliability Engineer | Bangalore | 18 December [Result (Ghosted by HR)]

I recently had an interview experience for an SRE role at NetApp. I have 4.3 years of experience in SRE/DevOps and am currently working as an SRE at XYZ. The interview process started after a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, and a first technical round was scheduled.

However, the initial Round 1 (60 mins, Tech) was a no-show from the panel, and HR failed to inform me, despite my confirmation just hours before. This was quite frustrating. The round was eventually rescheduled for about a week later. During this rescheduled technical round, I was asked a variety of questions covering both coding snippets and core SRE/DevOps concepts:

• I had to explain the meaning and predict the output of various bash and python code snippets.
• A question on how StatefulSets differ from Deployments in Kubernetes.
• An explanation of namespaces in Kubernetes and their significance.
• Questions about Taints and Tolerations in Kubernetes.
• How to ensure that different replicas/pods for a deployment run on different nodes within a Kubernetes cluster.
• What steps to take if a Terraform state file gets accidentally deleted.
• Explanation of Nginx rate limiting.
• A comparison between helm install and helm upgrade --install.
• An explanation of how Helm works generally.
• Questions relating to Nginx and Ingress controllers.
• Concepts around CDN, rate limiting, DDOS, and DNS flow.
• How certificates work within a Kubernetes environment.

I felt I answered most of these questions fairly well, and the round seemed to go decently.

Afterward, the HR person contacted me for an in-office interview round. I requested some time to provide my available slots, but since then, HR has completely ghosted me.

My key takeaways from this experience are:

• NetApp seems to have a really poor talent acquisition culture.
• It's a reminder never to waste my time or leaves on companies that don't respect a candidate's time.

I haven't faced such an issue before and would be interested to know if others have had similar experiences with NetApp.