Congratulations on making it this far. Our team put this guide together so you know exactly what to expect and how to put your best foot forward.
In an initial screening, you'll meet with a hiring manager to determine mutual fit and discuss a few core infrastructure and operational principles related to the role. If we decide to move forward, your availability will be requested to meet with additional members of our team.
Your interview loop covers a system architecture design session and a career deep dive. Each session is designed to understand how you approach real infrastructure challenges — not to trip you up.
Three focused conversations designed to understand your craft, your thinking, and your potential as a teammate.
Get to know us while we get to know you. We'll talk shop, answer your questions, and explore your capabilities and interests to ensure the role is the right fit.
A collaborative whiteboarding session where you'll design infrastructure for a real-world scenario — covering networking, deployment pipelines, container orchestration, and monitoring. More detail below.
We'll cover how you budget your time, manage conflict, work with others, and navigate the balance between time, scope, and quality. Come prepared with real examples.
If our team is aligned that you'd be a great addition, an offer is extended. We move quickly.
This session evaluates how you think about building and operating production infrastructure. Rather than trivia about specific tools, we're interested in your reasoning about tradeoffs, failure modes, and operational excellence.
Come prepared to diagram systems on a whiteboard and discuss the 'why' behind your design decisions — we value thoughtful tradeoff analysis over perfect answers.
Find a quiet environment with a strong internet connection. Keep your phone on do not disturb. A clear mind is your most valuable tool.
Review your experience with cloud platforms, container orchestration, CI/CD tools, and monitoring systems. Be ready to discuss what you've built and why you chose specific tools.
Avoid hypotheticals. Use real-world experiences that quantify and qualify your answers. We care about what you've done and how you handled it.
You have a lot of companies to choose from. Think about what you're looking for and why our team resonates with you.
Don't solve problems in your head. Walking us through your reasoning lets us help if you're headed off-track — and you might find it's easier than you think.
Before designing, clarify the constraints: traffic scale, uptime requirements, team size, budget. These shape every infrastructure decision.
Show that you think about what happens when things break. Redundancy, failover, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation matter more than happy-path perfection.
Getting stuck is perfectly fine. Step back, walk through what you have, and ask questions. Interviewers respect clarity-seeking.
Don't just name-drop technologies. Explain why you'd choose Kubernetes over ECS, Terraform over Pulumi, or Datadog over Prometheus for a given context.
Think beyond deployment. Who pages when it breaks? How do you roll back? What does the runbook look like? Operational empathy is a signal we look for.
This is a two-way street. Prepare different questions for each interviewer — variety shows genuine curiosity. You might consider writing them down ahead of time.
Infrastructure is a vast field — don't feel you need to know everything. These resources cover the fundamentals.
The essential reference for distributed systems and infrastructure design
Free online book covering how Google runs production systems
Best practices for cloud architecture across reliability, security, and performance
Methodology for building modern, scalable, maintainable applications
Official docs for container orchestration fundamentals
It never hurts to hear from an interview coach
The central foundation of our culture. We perform best in a high trust, low blame environment — and that's exactly what we build.
We hire incredibly talented people and give them autonomy in how teams organize and make decisions.
Despite being a distributed team, we believe the largest challenges ahead involve working closely together.
We are not family, but we only win when the team wins.
Altium prides itself in being a leader in innovation — pushing the boundaries of what's possible for electronics design teams.
We are all humans just typing on computers. Let's be real with each other.
There's a universe of things you could know — don't sweat it. Bring the best version of yourself forward, think clearly, communicate openly, and you'll be fine. We're rooting for you.