I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Global Relay (Vancouver, BC) in Oct 2024
Interview
I was approached by a recruiter for GR who arranged the interviews. First round with a hiring manager to look at my experience and basic technical questions. Second round technical interview with engineers from the company and the same hiring manager.
The questions in the technical interview were fairly straight forward and match others described here. They didn't feel like a good assessment of ability but rather "how well do you know core linux commands". I felt I did fine on these questions as I know my way around the terminal and have been in DevOps for years.
The technical interview seemed a bit adhoc and didn't feel like it actually assessed for problem solving or team work. Someone who rote-learned all the core documentation of ansible and the Arch setup guide would do really well at this.
Finally, the interview concluded with a live coding test, something akin to an easy leetcode question e.g. use python to write the first 30 items in the fibonnacci sequence. Again, this felt like a way to weed out people who can't code at all and to drive down offers since this isn't the kind of coding that you actually need to do in DevOps. I found this exercise surprisingly difficult and didn't feel at all prepared for it. I've written a lot of software in python for a variety of purposes but this did not play to my strengths.
In the end I received an offer about $20k below market rates which I declined.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Find all the files in a system containing a given string and change them to a new string. Describe how you would do this in bash.