Staff / Principal Interview Questions
228 questions across 34 categories
Expert-level and system-design questions — the scope, trade-offs, and organizational reasoning expected at the most senior technical levels.
How would you design pod topology spread constraints to keep a Deployment's replicas evenly distributed across availability zones?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
A CSI driver upgrade causes new attach operations to fail while already-mounted volumes keep working — how do you investigate, and how would you roll this out more safely next time?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
How would you safely expand a PVC for a running StatefulSet without downtime, and what does the StorageClass need to support?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
Why might mounting the same ReadWriteOnce PVC work for two pods on some clusters but fail on others?
AdvancedKubernetes6 min
A StatefulSet pod is rescheduled to a new node but its volume won't attach — what's happening, and how do you fix it?
AdvancedKubernetes8 min
What does volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer actually solve, and what breaks in a multi-zone cluster if you don't set it?
AdvancedKubernetes6 min
A CronJob has been silently creating thousands of failed Jobs over several days — how did this happen, and how would you prevent it?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
How would you design a Job for a task that must never run twice, even if a pod fails partway through (e.g., a billing charge)?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
A Deployment's new pods keep getting scheduled but immediately evicted, while old pods keep running fine — what changed?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
A rolling update to a Deployment is stuck at 50% — how do you determine whether it's a bad readiness probe, insufficient capacity, or a PodDisruptionBudget blocking it?
AdvancedKubernetes8 min
How would you safely roll out a breaking change to a DaemonSet running a critical node-level agent across a large production cluster?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
A StatefulSet pod is deleted but isn't recreated with the same identity fast enough — what's actually blocking it?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min