Red Hat Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So I had like three rounds spread out over a few weeks. The first one was like a quick intro, then a DSA coding question, medium level I'd say. The interviewer was chill, gave me some hints when I was stuck, so it felt pretty conversational. After coding, we did some technical deep dives. The whole thing took about an hour and fifteen minutes. I felt okay, but definitely missed a few easy things. Got an update after like three weeks saying I'd move on. The second technical round was more about the actual job stuff, day-to-day tasks, which was pretty easy. The last round was with the hiring manager, and it was more of a chat about team culture and how we work, and my background, not really a tough interview.

It was a pretty smooth process, with questions based on scenarios that really required you to understand things deeply, not just memorize. The main thing was seeing how you could actually use what you learned in real situations. This really made you think critically and look at things from different sides. Instead of just recalling facts, they wanted to see how you'd apply your knowledge practically. This not only helped you get a better handle on the material but also prepped you for what's next. The questions pushed you to be creative, connect ideas, and show how they work together. This way of checking things made for a better learning experience, letting you show off your sharp thinking and how you can adapt what you know to new stuff. It really showed how important it is to think fast and make calls with the info you have, ending up with a much more solid grasp of the topic.

So the whole thing started with HR, first an email to set things up and then a quick phone chat. It was pretty basic, just high level stuff. HR was pretty on time with comms, but sometimes it was just short emails and didn't really answer what I asked. Then I talked to the hiring manager, which was a really good chat, felt good about it. They asked me some stuff about how browsers work, like the whole request flow and load balancers, not super deep but a good talk. After that was a panel with two people from the team. I talked about my past work and answered some tech questions about VPC, Security Groups, and setting up a Kubernetes cluster. It was a cool conversation and they seemed to like my answers and background. The most technical part was the system design interview. They wanted me to design a system for managing access requests to OCP clusters for SRE teams. I did the design and they gave me good feedback on how I thought about it. Even though it all went pretty well, I didn't get the job. They said someone else had better Azure skills, which was kinda weird since they told me the job was about OCP on AWS, which is my strong suit and we talked about that on the panel. So yeah, the interviews themselves were structured and the technical parts felt fair and helpful. Talking with the team was great. HR comms were a bit lacking though, just short emails, not much feedback for all the time I put in. They did mention another job in the rejection email, but it seems like I'd have to do the whole thing over again.