From our research
What this interview looks like
Indian employers hire for these roles through an HR screen, a hiring-manager round on your actual work, a technical round led by a lead or architect (often with a hands-on scenario such as an outage, an alert, a crash log or a ticket), a behavioural round and a final HR discussion, spread across several days and sometimes preceded by an online test or lab. Security roles often add a CISO or security-head conversation; support roles add a customer-handling or call simulation. ExamPilot compresses this into one 17-minute panel: HR screen, hiring manager, role or technical lead, STAR behavioural round and closing. You get a scored report on role knowledge, problem solving, communication and attitude, with specific feedback on each technical scenario and every behavioural answer.
How it is weighted
Pass/fail per round in real life, often with a hands-on troubleshooting or whiteboard architecture exercise in the technical round; scored here against the corporate rubric.
Who this is for
Cloud engineers on AWS or Azure, site reliability and platform engineers, network engineers (enterprise, ISP or data-centre) and Linux system administrators, including support or sysadmin professionals moving into cloud with a certification such as AWS SAA, AZ-104, CCNA or RHCSA.
The panel focuses on
- IAM, VPC and networking design on AWS or Azure, explained with trade-offs
- Infrastructure as code and CI/CD for infrastructure, not just click-ops
- SLOs, error budgets and a calm walk-through of a real incident
- OSI layer-by-layer troubleshooting, routing (BGP/OSPF) and VLAN design
- Linux internals in practice: systemd, processes, storage, shell automation
- Ownership of an outage or migration you ran, with numbers
Step 1
Pick your domain
The expert on the panel probes these areas at the level of this role. Optional here; you can choose during setup.
Step 2
Choose how you want to be interviewed
1:1 interview
One interviewer runs every round and adapts the focus as you go. Lower pressure; ideal for a first attempt.
Ms. Priyanka Deshmukh
Technical lead
Panel interview · 3 members
Most realisticEach member leads their own round and hands over to the next. They hear each other, so a weak answer will be revisited.
Ms. Neha Kulkarni
HR member
Mr. Vikram Malhotra
Hiring manager
Ms. Priyanka Deshmukh
Technical lead
What to expect
5 rounds · 17 minutes
A private-sector hiring loop compressed into one sitting, the way most Indian companies run it: HR screen → hiring-manager round on your actual work → role/technical round led by a lead → communication & behavioural (STAR) round → closing on expectations and your questions. Works for software, product, sales, finance, HR, support and campus hiring by swapping the role bank.
- Round 1
HR screen
· 3:00Understand background, motivation for this role and company, and basic logistics; check that the resume story holds together.
Ms. Neha Kulkarni2–3 questionsup to 1 follow-up each - Round 2
Hiring-manager round
· 4:00Assess ownership, judgement and how the candidate actually works: what they shipped, closed or ran, their specific part, and how they would approach this job.
Mr. Vikram Malhotra2–3 questionsup to 2 follow-ups each - Round 3
Role / technical round
· 5:00Test role knowledge and problem-solving in the chosen specialisation: fundamentals, one scenario to think through aloud, and trade-offs.
Ms. Priyanka Deshmukh3–4 questionsup to 2 follow-ups each - Round 4
Communication & behavioural round
· 3:00Assess collaboration, conflict handling, resilience and clarity of expression through Situation–Task–Action–Result examples.
Mr. Vikram Malhotra2–2 questionsup to 1 follow-up each - Round 5
Expectations & closing
· 2:00Cover practical expectations and let the candidate ask questions; close professionally.
Ms. Neha Kulkarni1–2 questions
Sample questions
Infra / Security / Mobile / IT Cloud / SRE interview questions
Questions panels commonly ask in the Infra / Security / Mobile / IT Cloud / SRE interview, with what a strong answer covers. Practise them aloud with the AI panel.
- Cloud networking
Design the network for a three-tier web application on AWS so that the database is never reachable from the internet.
What a strong answer covers
A VPC across at least two availability zones, public subnets only for the load balancer, private subnets for app servers and the database, security groups allowing traffic tier to tier, NAT for outbound updates, and no public IP on the database. Mention IAM roles and logging. Avoid putting everything in one public subnet.
- Infrastructure as code
Why should infrastructure be defined in Terraform or Bicep rather than created by clicking in the console? Give a real problem it solved for you.
What a strong answer covers
Explain repeatability, version control, peer review, drift detection and quick environment rebuilds, then give a concrete example such as recreating a staging environment in minutes. Mention state management and secrets handling. Avoid generic claims with no personal experience.
- SLOs
Our checkout service has a 99.9 percent availability SLO. What does that allow per month, and what happens when the error budget is used up?
What a strong answer covers
Roughly forty-three minutes of downtime in a thirty-day month. When the budget is spent, the team slows risky releases and prioritises reliability work, as agreed with product beforehand. Explain how SLIs are measured. Avoid treating SLOs as only a reporting number.
- Incident response
At two in the morning, alerts show error rates spiking on the payments API. Walk me through your first thirty minutes as on-call.
What a strong answer covers
Acknowledge the alert, check dashboards and recent deployments, decide on rollback or mitigation quickly, open an incident channel, communicate status to stakeholders, and keep a timeline for the post-mortem. Avoid debugging silently for an hour without informing anyone.
- Network troubleshooting
A user says a website loads in the office but not from home. Troubleshoot it layer by layer.
What a strong answer covers
Check physical connectivity and Wi-Fi, IP configuration and DHCP, DNS resolution, routing and gateway, firewall or proxy rules, and the application layer with tools like ping, traceroute, nslookup and curl. Explain what each result tells you. Avoid jumping to reinstalling the browser.
- Routing
For a network engineer: when would you choose OSPF over BGP inside an enterprise, and where does BGP become necessary?
What a strong answer covers
OSPF suits internal routing with fast convergence; BGP is used for connecting to ISPs, multi-homing and controlling routing policy between autonomous systems. Mention VLAN segmentation and redundancy. Avoid confusing interior and exterior protocols.
- Linux
A Linux server's disk is full and the application has stopped writing logs. How do you investigate and fix it safely?
What a strong answer covers
Use df and du to find the culprit, check for large logs or deleted files held open with lsof, clean up or rotate safely, and set up logrotate and monitoring to prevent recurrence. Avoid deleting files blindly in system directories.
- Ownership
Describe a migration or outage you owned. What were the numbers before and after?
What a strong answer covers
A STAR answer: the system, the risk, your plan, what went wrong, how you recovered, and measurable outcomes such as downtime, cost savings or latency improvements. Avoid vague stories without numbers or ownership.
- Career switch
You hold an AWS certification but have mostly worked in on-premises support. How would you prove you can handle production cloud work?
What a strong answer covers
Point to hands-on proof: labs you built end to end, scripts that automated a support task, a small workload you migrated, or a home project with Terraform and monitoring. Be honest about what you have not done in production and how you are closing that gap. Avoid presenting the certificate itself as production experience.
Reading is not rehearsing. Answer these out loud to an AI Infra / Security / Mobile / IT Cloud / SRE panel that follows up like the real one.
Practise these questionsMeet the panel
Your AI interviewers
Distinct personas, voices and questioning styles, briefed on this role.
Ms. Neha Kulkarni
ChairHR member
HR business partner, IT services
Friendly, efficient, detail-checking.
Female voice · 4 languages
Mr. Vikram Malhotra
Hiring manager
Engineering manager / Regional manager (hiring manager)
Direct, outcome-focused, fair but demanding.
Male voice · 2 languages
Ms. Priyanka Deshmukh
Technical lead
Site Reliability Engineering lead, product company; ex-Linux and network administrator
Hands-on, methodical, enjoys a good outage story.
Female voice · 4 languages
Languages
Answer in the language you think in
The panel asks in your chosen language. Switch mid-answer if you like.
- English
- Hinglish (Hindi + English)Hinglish
How scoring works
A report you can act on
Every round is scored on the rubric
Each interviewer scores only the criteria their round covers. Weights add up to your overall score out of 100.
Only what you actually said counts
Feedback quotes your own answers. Rounds you skip show as “Not assessed” rather than a zero.
Communication is always measured
Fluency, clarity, confidence and structure are tracked across the whole interview, in any language.
Pass mark, then a plan
You see the pass mark for this interview, your gaps, and the courses that close them fastest.
Scored on
- Role knowledge30%
Depth and accuracy of role/domain knowledge; understands the tools, concepts and trade-offs of the job; grounds claims in real work.
- Problem solving & structure25%
Breaks problems down, asks clarifying questions, reasons about trade-offs and edge cases, structures answers (context, action, result).
- Communication25%
Clear, concise, confident; listens and answers the question asked; adapts the explanation to the listener; professional register.
- Culture & attitude20%
Ownership, honesty about limits, coachability, collaboration, motivation for this role and realistic expectations.
Pass mark 65 / 100 · Corporate interview — HR, hiring manager & role round (panel)
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