Rackspace Technology Interview Questions
& Process

I had an initial recruiter chat, then three more interviews. After that, I had to do this big project with a slide deck, a ghostwritten email, and a visual thing, which took me over 25 hours. They didn't give me any feedback on it, just an email saying I was moving on. I had another interview after that, and the interviewer was literally seeing my resume for the first time. Then, I got an email saying I didn't get the job. The rejection email was super generic and felt really dismissive after all the work I put in. They didn't say why I was rejected, didn't acknowledge the project, and didn't mention if they'd use any of it. It sucks because it started off great, but then went downhill. It honestly felt like they were trying to get free work out of candidates.

I applied through LinkedIn for SRE/Observability. The first step was an HR screening, which was pretty standard, covering the role and the interview process. Next was a technical interview. The first part focused on observability, which was straightforward and conceptual, but they seemed more interested in the specific tools rather than the underlying ideas, which is typical for consulting. The second part covered general DevOps and cloud architecture. This part felt unplanned; for instance, when I was asked a troubleshooting question and asked for clarification on the scenario, the interviewer couldn't answer and changed the question. The questions leaned more towards Cloud/Solution Architect rather than SRE, which made me question if the interviewer truly understood the SRE role. When it was my turn to ask questions, the answers were vague, like 'it depends on the client/project.' I really think they should rename the position to Cloud or Solutions Architect because it didn't feel like an SRE role at all.

I first had a quick chat with the recruiter who wanted to know about my background to see if I was a good fit for what they were looking for. Then, I had a technical chat with the hiring manager about data engineering topics like Pig, Airflow, and Oozie, which were key for the role. After that, I had another session with the hiring manager where we talked about Pig, Airflow, Oozie, and Spark, both theoretically and based on my experience. I also had to walk through some Oozie code from a real project and explain what each part did. To finish, I got an easy-to-medium Leetcode-style coding question about binary trees. Then HR made an offer. The whole thing went smoothly, and I got the offer the same day. They were great with communication, setting up interviews, and sticking to the schedule.

The job description was for Senior Devops Engineer, but during the 2nd interview, they mentioned it was for an Architect role. This was fine with me as I have experience in both. The process included an initial screening call, followed by an in-depth technical interview with two team members and a manager. The third round was a technical interview with two managers and a member from another team, focusing on high-level and strategic questions. They asked about AWS functionalities and Terraform, but I felt the feedback was dishonest. For instance, after I explained using AWS Organization and the option of Landing Zone or Control Tower for managing multiple AWS accounts, they claimed I lacked experience in Control Tower, which is untrue given my background at Amazon and extensive experience managing AWS environments.