1. Tell me about yourself
Sure, absolutely.
My name is Marta, and I'm a Senior DevOps Engineer with over eight years of experience in cloud infrastructure, automation, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and production support.
Currently, I'm working at Wells Fargo, where I focus on building and maintaining reliable AWS infrastructure, improving deployment automation, and supporting containerized applications.
A big part of my work involves Terraform, Amazon EKS, Docker, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and AWS services such as EC2, VPC, IAM, ALB, and CloudWatch.
One of my key accomplishments was improving our CI/CD pipelines and reducing deployment time from approximately 45 minutes to 8 minutes through automation.
I also worked on improving our release and rollback processes, reducing rollback time from around 20 minutes to 2 minutes using blue-green deployment strategies.
Another area I've focused on is cloud cost optimization. By analyzing AWS resource utilization and right-sizing infrastructure, I helped reduce our monthly development AWS spending by approximately 35%.
Before Wells Fargo, I worked at Home Depot, where I supported cloud-hosted business applications, networking, DNS, SSL/TLS, application integrations, and production operations.
Over the years, I've developed a strong understanding of how cloud infrastructure, automation, networking, and application reliability work together.
What interests me about this opportunity is the chance to contribute at a broader platform level, improve engineering standards, support cloud strategy, and help teams build reliable, secure, and cost-efficient infrastructure.
I believe my hands-on engineering background and experience solving infrastructure problems would allow me to contribute effectively to this role.
Speaking time: approximately 90 seconds to 2 minutes.
2. What are your day-to-day responsibilities?
My day-to-day responsibilities involve cloud infrastructure management, automation, CI/CD pipeline improvements, Kubernetes operations, and production support.
I typically start by reviewing AWS CloudWatch dashboards and alerts to make sure our infrastructure and applications are healthy.
I check for any failed deployments, high CPU or memory utilization, application availability issues, and infrastructure alerts.
Then I review our priorities with the team and identify any blockers or production issues that need immediate attention.
A significant part of my work involves Terraform. I maintain reusable Terraform modules to provision and manage AWS infrastructure across multiple environments.
For example, if a development team needs a new application environment, I can use our Terraform modules to provision VPC networking, EC2 resources, security groups, IAM roles, and load balancers.
I also work with Jenkins and GitHub Actions to maintain automated build, testing, security scanning, and deployment workflows.
On the Kubernetes side, I support Amazon EKS workloads, investigate failed deployments, check pod health, and review resource requests, limits, and autoscaling configurations.
Another responsibility is cloud cost optimization. I review AWS Cost Explorer and CloudWatch utilization data to identify underutilized resources and opportunities for right-sizing.
I also collaborate with development teams, security engineers, and other infrastructure teams to troubleshoot issues and improve operational reliability.
My main goal is to make our infrastructure more reliable, secure, automated, and cost-efficient while reducing manual work for engineering teams.
3. Production incident #1 — Deployment failure and rollback
CI/CD · NGINX · Blue-green deployment · Recovery
Marta's resume confirms blue-green deployment automation and a reduction in rollback time from 20 minutes to 2 minutes. The specific failure described below is an illustrative incident to adapt.
Sure. One example I can share involves a deployment issue where a new application release was causing errors after being deployed.
We noticed the issue through application health checks and started investigating the deployment.
My first priority was to understand the impact and restore the previous stable version as quickly as possible.
We were using a blue-green deployment strategy, where the current stable version and the new application version were deployed separately.
I checked the application health, reviewed the deployment logs, and confirmed that the new version wasn't responding correctly.
Instead of spending too much time troubleshooting while users were affected, we switched traffic back to the previous stable version.
We used our automated NGINX and Bash-based traffic-switching process to perform the rollback.
Once the previous version was serving traffic again, we verified application availability and reviewed the failed release with the development team.
After the incident, we improved our deployment validation and health-check procedures to reduce the risk of similar failures.
One of the major improvements from our release automation work was reducing rollback time from approximately 20 minutes to 2 minutes.
This experience reinforced the importance of having a reliable rollback strategy and prioritizing service restoration during production incidents.
Technical follow-up questions
Q: What is blue-green deployment?
Blue-green deployment uses two separate application environments. One serves production traffic while the other hosts the new version. Once the new version passes validation, traffic switches to it. If problems occur, traffic can be redirected to the previous version.
Q: How did you switch traffic?
In this example, an automated Bash script updated the NGINX upstream configuration and reloaded NGINX after validating the configuration.
Q: What commands would you use?
nginx -t
sudo systemctl reload nginx
sudo systemctl status nginx
curl -I https://application.example.com
Q: What would you do if the new version had already changed the database schema?
I would verify database backward compatibility before switching traffic. An application rollback is not automatically a safe database rollback, so schema migrations need a separate recovery plan.
4. Production incident #2 — AWS infrastructure connectivity issue
AWS VPC · Security groups · ALB · Networking
This is a sample incident built around Marta's documented AWS networking and connectivity troubleshooting experience.
Another incident involved an application connectivity problem in our AWS environment.
The application was deployed, but users were experiencing connection failures, and the application wasn't responding as expected.
I started by checking the application health and reviewing the AWS load balancer configuration.
I noticed that the Application Load Balancer was reporting unhealthy targets.
My next step was to investigate the target group health checks, EC2 instance status, and security group configurations.
After reviewing the networking configuration, we identified a security group rule that was preventing the load balancer from reaching the application on the required port.
I worked with the team to update the security group configuration through Terraform, following our normal review and approval process.
After applying the change, we verified that the ALB health checks were passing and the application became accessible again.
We continued monitoring the application to confirm that connectivity was stable.
As a preventive measure, we reviewed our Terraform modules and added additional validation to reduce the possibility of similar networking configuration issues.
The key lesson was that even a small infrastructure configuration change can have a major impact on application availability, which is why automated validation and infrastructure code reviews are so important.
Technical follow-up questions
Q: How do you investigate an ALB reporting unhealthy targets?
I check target group health status and reason codes, listener rules, health-check path and port, application readiness, security groups, network ACLs, and route tables.
Q: What AWS commands might you use?
aws elbv2 describe-target-health \
--target-group-arn <target-group-arn>
aws ec2 describe-security-groups \
--group-ids <security-group-id>
aws ec2 describe-instances \
--instance-ids <instance-id>
Q: Why manage security groups through Terraform?
Because it keeps infrastructure configuration version-controlled, reviewable, and consistent across environments.
5. Explain your company structure and engineering team
Marta's resume does not specify Wells Fargo's actual reporting structure or team size. This is a reasonable sample description, not a verified organizational chart.
At Wells Fargo, I work as part of the cloud infrastructure and DevOps engineering function.
Our responsibility is to support AWS infrastructure, application deployment automation, and production reliability.
We collaborate closely with application developers, QA engineers, security teams, networking engineers, and other infrastructure teams.
The DevOps engineers focus on infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD automation, Kubernetes workloads, monitoring, and production troubleshooting.
Development teams are responsible for application functionality and code changes, while we provide the infrastructure and automated deployment processes that support those applications.
Security engineers help establish access controls, vulnerability management, and security requirements.
Networking engineers support connectivity, routing, DNS, and network security.
When we work on major infrastructure changes or production issues, we coordinate with the relevant teams to make sure the changes are implemented safely.
Although my primary role has been hands-on engineering, I also contribute to engineering standardization through reusable Terraform modules, automated workflows, documentation, and technical collaboration.
Cloud Infrastructure / Engineering Leadership
DevOps / Platform Engineering Team
Marta — Senior DevOps Engineer
AWS · Terraform · Kubernetes · CI/CD · Reliability
Application / QA
Security / Networking
Operations / Support
Illustrative collaboration structure; actual reporting lines should be confirmed.
6. What meetings do you attend?
We typically work in an Agile-style environment, so I participate in regular engineering and operational meetings.
We have daily stand-ups to review our progress, discuss current priorities, and identify blockers.
During sprint planning, we review upcoming infrastructure work, automation improvements, and technical tasks.
We also have technical discussions and design reviews when we're introducing new AWS infrastructure, modifying Terraform modules, or improving deployment workflows.
For production releases, we coordinate deployment schedules, change approvals, risk assessments, and rollback plans.
If a significant production issue occurs, we conduct an incident review to understand what happened, identify the root cause, and discuss preventive actions.
I also participate in cross-team meetings with developers, security engineers, and infrastructure teams when changes affect multiple systems.
These meetings help us maintain visibility, manage dependencies, and ensure infrastructure changes support the broader engineering goals.
| Meeting | Example frequency | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Daily stand-up | Daily | Priorities and blockers |
| Sprint planning | Every 2 weeks | Work allocation |
| Backlog refinement | Weekly | Technical requirements |
| Architecture review | As needed | Cloud design decisions |
| Change / release review | Before major releases | Deployment safety |
| Incident review | After significant incidents | RCA and prevention |
| Engineering 1:1 | Weekly or biweekly | Development and priorities |
7. Tell me about your cloud cost optimization experience
This is one of Marta's strongest documented accomplishments and is particularly relevant to the management position.
Cloud cost optimization has been an important part of my work at Wells Fargo.
We wanted to reduce unnecessary AWS spending, particularly in our development environments, without affecting application performance or reliability.
I started by reviewing AWS Cost Explorer reports to identify our major cost drivers.
Then I used CloudWatch metrics to analyze resource utilization, including CPU and memory trends where available.
We identified opportunities to right-size EC2 instances and optimize storage resources based on actual usage.
I also reviewed infrastructure configurations to make sure our development environments were provisioned consistently.
We implemented the approved changes and monitored the environments afterward to verify that application performance remained stable.
As a result of this optimization effort, we reduced monthly development AWS spending by approximately 35%.
For me, cloud cost optimization is not just about reducing expenses. It's about finding the right balance between performance, availability, security, and cost.
8. Tell me about your Terraform experience
Terraform is one of the main tools I use for infrastructure automation.
At Wells Fargo, I've worked with reusable Terraform modules to provision AWS resources across more than eight environments.
These modules cover infrastructure components such as VPCs, subnets, EC2 instances, IAM roles, security groups, load balancers, and Auto Scaling.
We use remote Terraform state in Amazon S3 and state locking to help prevent conflicting infrastructure changes.
Our infrastructure code is version-controlled, and changes go through a review process before being applied.
One of the biggest advantages of using reusable modules is consistency. Instead of manually configuring infrastructure for every environment, we can standardize the resources and customize them using variables.
This reduces configuration drift, makes troubleshooting easier, and helps us provision infrastructure more efficiently.
I've also worked with Terraform and Ansible together to automate AWS infrastructure provisioning and server configuration.
I believe Infrastructure as Code is essential for managing cloud environments reliably at scale.
9. How do you demonstrate leadership without being a people manager?
This is likely one of the most important questions for this particular job.
My background has primarily been in senior hands-on engineering rather than formal people management.
However, I've contributed to technical leadership by helping standardize infrastructure provisioning, improve deployment processes, and establish repeatable engineering practices.
For example, at Wells Fargo, I worked on reusable Terraform modules across multiple AWS environments, which helped make infrastructure provisioning more consistent.
I also contributed to improving CI/CD automation and release reliability.
I believe strong technical leadership involves understanding problems, evaluating trade-offs, communicating clearly, and helping teams adopt solutions that are reliable and maintainable.
I also understand that a formal engineering management role involves additional responsibilities, including people development, prioritization, resource planning, and stakeholder management.
Those are areas I'm interested in developing further while bringing a strong technical foundation to the team.
10. Why are you interested in Herc Rentals?
I'm interested in this opportunity because it combines cloud infrastructure engineering with broader platform ownership and leadership responsibilities.
My experience has been focused on building reliable AWS environments, automating infrastructure with Terraform, supporting Kubernetes workloads, and improving CI/CD and operational processes.
What interests me about this position is the opportunity to apply that experience at a broader organizational level, helping establish engineering standards, improve cloud governance, and support a long-term cloud platform strategy.
I also appreciate the focus on reliability, security, and cost optimization, because those are areas where I've delivered measurable improvements.
For example, I've helped reduce deployment time from 45 minutes to 8 minutes, improve rollback time from 20 minutes to 2 minutes, and reduce development AWS spending by 35%.
I see this as an opportunity to contribute my technical experience while continuing to grow in engineering leadership and platform strategy.
11. Advanced questions to prepare for
1. How would you design a multi-cloud platform strategy?
Start with business requirements, workload suitability, security, compliance, cost, and recovery objectives. Define consistent identity, networking, monitoring, tagging, IaC, and governance standards across AWS, Azure, and OCI. Avoid moving workloads between clouds without a clear business justification.
2. How would you manage a cloud engineering team?
3. How do you manage cloud governance?
4. How would you design disaster recovery?
5. How do you prevent Terraform configuration drift?
6. What is your experience with Azure and OCI?
7. How would you handle disagreement between engineers?
8. How would you measure platform engineering success?
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