I have been recently interviewing to understand if there are any roles that can work for me.

I recently applied to https://www.observe.ai/ and they sent me questionairre to answer. Let me share the form, the questionairre and my answers so that people can learn from it, or just read through, just for curiosity etc

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Observe.AI || Tech Lead - Infrastructure Engg Information Form

Hello there! We are from the Talent Team at Observe.ai and we are elated at the prospect that you would love to apply and work with us, if selected. Requesting you to kindly update the details on this form and share so that we can take it to the next steps immediately.

Thanks,

OAI TA Team

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Hello! Please tell us your name *

Karuppiah Natarajan

Please tell us about your Role Aspiration *

I'm looking for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) kind of role, where I'm not just doing some basic stuff that I have been doing for years - like setting up CI/CD pipelines, setting up infrastructure systems

What are the Current Projects that you are working on? *

I'm currently learning Rust. Previously, when I was working at Ola, my last company, I was working on infrastructure - specifically on secrets management and also helping with running Kubernetes Clusters on AWS and on Ola Krutrim Cloud ( https://www.olakrutrim.com/cloud )

The Technical Stack that you are working with? *

Most of my career - I have used Golang

Please tell us about your Tech Lead experience *

I have been a tech lead in VMWare, where I was working with two other colleagues. It was a small team and we were working on release engineering tools and creating tooling for testing and verifying complex software (Tanzu) that helped spin up and run and manage Kubernetes Clusters. It was open source - Tanzu Community Edition ( https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/community-edition , http://tanzucommunityedition.io )

After that, I joined Togai, an early startup back then, now acquired by Zuora. I maintained the whole of Togai infrastructure, which was on AWS. We managed the infrastructure using Terraform and Chef Cookbooks. I helped set up monitoring and alerting for some of their services. I tried to help with rising costs in monitoring. I also fixed memory leak issues. I helped them setup low cost CI/CD on GitHub Actions using our own infrastructure. Some blogs on those - https://karuppiah.dev/monitoring-nats-using-new-relic-instrumentation , https://karuppiah.dev/upgrading-a-nats-cluster-in-production , https://karuppiah.dev/managing-github-organization-level-secrets-for-private-github-repositories-for-free-on-github-free-plan-using-terraform , https://karuppiah.dev/managing-github-organization-level-secrets-for-private-github-repositories-for-free-on-github-free-plan-using-terraform , https://karuppiah.dev/resizing-disk-increasing-the-size , https://karuppiah.dev/managing-tens-of-thousands-of-messages-in-deadletter-queues-at-togai , https://karuppiah.dev/understanding-data-ingested-in-new-relic , https://karuppiah.dev/understanding-postgresql-new-relic-on-host-integration , https://karuppiah.dev/self-hosting-github-actions-runners , https://karuppiah.dev/debugging-and-fixing-a-memory-leak-in-a-nodejs-service-in-production . Some more links - https://github.com/karuppiah7890/github-actions-self-hosted-runner-terraform , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/github-actions-secrets-terraform , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/ec2-killer , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/ec2-github-runner , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/pg-query-killer , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/sqs-alerter , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/sqs-dump , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/publish-to-nats , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/sqs-delete , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/sqs-to-nats , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/stripe-to-togai , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/nats-docker , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/aws-tools , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/postgres-alerter , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/redis-ha-check , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/service-alerter , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/puppet-server , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/urlcrawl , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/redis-alerter

Later, I joined Ola Cabs, my last company. There I worked as a lead (SDE-3) in a team of 8, all SDE-2, with an existing lead (SDE-3). I helped mentor some of the juniors. I worked with Kubernetes Clusters, CI/CD pipelines, Developer Platform (Backstage , https://backstage.io ), Hashicorp Vault for Secrets Management. I built tools whenever necessary. I also helped Security Team with Security Compliance. Some links around these - https://karuppiah.dev/trying-out-squid-proxy , https://karuppiah.dev/trying-to-authenticate-with-vault-using-openid-connect-oidc-using-dex , https://karuppiah.dev/trying-to-authenticate-in-a-demo-application-using-openid-connect-oidc-using-keycloak , https://karuppiah.dev/trying-out-prometheus-operator , https://karuppiah.dev/listing-aws-ec2-instance-information-with-aws-cli-v2 , https://karuppiah.dev/trying-out-prometheus-operators-alertmanager-and-alertmanager-config-custom-resources , https://karuppiah.dev/aws-api-invalidsignatureexception-signature-expired-error , https://karuppiah.dev/shipping-cloudwatch-logs-to-s3 , https://karuppiah.dev/working-with-backstage-software-templates , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-helm-chart , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-policy-cp , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-policy-backup , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-policy-restore , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-kv-cp ,https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-kv-backup , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-kv-restore , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-k8s-auth-cp , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-k8s-auth-backup , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/vault-tooling-contributions , https://github.com/karuppiah7890/alertmanager-helm-chart

Please tell us out your Project Leading experience *

I liked mentoring and teaching people in the project. I also learned a lot from the people in the project. I customized our ways of working based on the team's comfort. I always tried to ensure that the project people had enough psychological safety to talk about anything they want by being very frank and always addressing the elephant in the room

This role requires you to be proficient with programming. Please let me know if you have written atleast 100 lines of code in the recent past which has been used in production? Please share your experience. *

Yes, I have. You can check all my open source tools code in my GitHub https://github.com/karuppiah7890

Could you please share your GitHub link with us ? *

https://github.com/karuppiah7890

Do you have Mentoring Experience? Please share more details *

Yes, I have mentored quite some people - mostly juniors, teaching them about code, open source software

Please tell about any recent promotions you got? *

I have gotten pay hikes in ThoughtWorks and VMWare. I got promoted in VMware from SDE-2 to SDE-3. I didn't stay in Togai or Ola for long to get pay hikes or promotions.

Please share your Current Compensation (Base + Bonus if any + Stocks) *

Rs 45,00,000 per annum Fixed. No Bonus, No Stocks

Please share your Compensation Expectations (Cash component + Stocks) *

Rs 45,00,000 per annum Fixed. Not expecting stocks

What's your notice period? Do mention if its negotiable? *

None / Nil. I can join immediately

Are you actively Interviewing? *

Yes

Do you have any Competitive Offer? *

No

Bangalore is our work location. Is that okay with you? *

Yes

Please mention if you have any questions you would like to ask and we would call you. *

I would like to the current team members, leadership (managers, reporting managers, hiring manager etc) and their LinkedIn profiles. I would also like talk to the current team and the leadership and understand where the company is at (what level, maturity etc) and where the company is at technically (services, infrastructure etc) and the kind of technical and non-technical problems the company is facing currently, and what is the current focus and what is the focus in the near future