Coinbase Senior Infra Engineer — owning the Kubernetes/Istio compute platform every service runs on

This interview tests deep, hands-on Kubernetes/CNCF platform-engineering experience: designing self-healing cluster management tooling, shipping net-new compute capabilities (cron scheduling, deployment strategies, EFS, right-sizing), and diagnosing distributed-systems failures to root cause at scale on AWS/GCP. Expect systems-design depth plus questions on applying AI tooling to infra workflows.

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What this interview tests

Kubernetes/Istio cluster management and self-healing automation at scale
Distributed systems failure diagnosis and root-cause resolution
AWS/GCP infrastructure primitives (EC2, EKS, IAM, VPC, networking) in production
CNCF ecosystem tooling depth (Helm, Prometheus, ArgoCD, Envoy)
Building developer-facing platform tooling for hundreds of internal engineers
Applying AI tooling responsibly to infrastructure automation and workflows

Common question themes

Design a self-healing Kubernetes cluster management system for hundreds of engineering teams

Walk through diagnosing and root-causing a complex distributed infrastructure failure you owned

How have you used Helm, Prometheus, ArgoCD, or Envoy to solve a concrete production problem

Design a new compute capability like cron scheduling or automated right-sizing for service owners

How would you reduce on-call burden and toil on a platform team through automation

Give an example of applying AI tooling to an infrastructure workflow and how you kept human oversight

How candidates describe it

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