Real interview questions with detailed answers — graded easy → medium → hard, with notes on what the industry actually asks per role. Pure Q&A, click any question to expand. Separate from the cheatsheets: cheatsheets teach the topic, these drill the questions.
Why GPUs win, CUDA vs Tensor cores, memory-bound vs compute-bound, coalescing, FlashAttention, NCCL hangs, parallelism strategy, occupancy, FP8.
inferencePrefill vs decode, KV cache, TTFT/TPOT, continuous batching, PagedAttention, quantization, speculative decoding, GQA/MQA, multi-LoRA, sizing.
trainingMemory breakdown, warmup, checkpointing, LoRA/QLoRA, BF16 vs FP16, NaN debugging, ZeRO stages, 3D parallelism, SFT/DPO/RLHF, MFU, resume.
genaiRAG vs fine-tuning, embeddings & chunking, rerankers, agents & function calling, MCP, prompt injection, evaluation, hallucination, context limits, LLMOps.
CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes reconciliation, IaC/Terraform state, deployment strategies, GitOps, CrashLoopBackOff debugging, secrets, incident response.
devsecopsShift-left, SAST/DAST/SCA, pipeline security gates, container/image hardening, policy-as-code (OPA/Kyverno), supply chain (SBOM/SLSA/signing), zero trust, CVE response.
networkingOSI/TCP-IP, TCP vs UDP, handshake, subnetting/CIDR, DNS, NAT, TLS, BGP, switch/router/LB, MTU/MSS, and layer-by-layer connectivity & latency troubleshooting.
linuxPermissions, links, processes/zombies, boot & systemd, load average, page cache, OOM killer, disk-full-but-du-clean, USE method, recovery, server hardening.
awsRegions/AZs, IAM roles vs users, S3 classes, EC2/Lambda/containers, VPC design, SG vs NACL, IRSA, RDS vs DynamoDB, autoscaling, HA architecture, cost, multi-account.
securityCIA triad, authn vs authz, crypto, password hashing, SQLi/XSS/CSRF/SSRF, OAuth/OIDC/JWT, threat modeling (STRIDE), secrets, breach response, supply chain, detection.
socSIEM & log analysis, IOC vs IOA, alert triage, MITRE ATT&CK, EDR/IDS/IPS, lateral movement & C2 detection, threat hunting, ransomware & insider-threat response, MTTD/MTTR.
infrastructureIaC & Terraform state, declarative vs imperative, immutable infra, VPC design, load balancing, autoscaling, caching/CDN, storage tiers, RTO/RPO & DR, HA across failure domains, cost engineering, region failover.
Alert triage, SIEM basics, Windows event IDs, phishing and email authentication, common ports, escalation criteria, ticket hygiene and shift handover.
socDeep investigation, process trees, lateral movement, persistence, credential theft, C2 beaconing, memory and disk triage, containment, and tuning detections.
networkFirewalls, IDS and IPS, segmentation, IPsec and VPNs, TLS inspection, DDoS, DNS security, 802.1X, wireless, zero trust and packet analysis.
awsIAM evaluation logic, SCPs, KMS, S3 exposure, VPC controls, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, IMDSv2, and responding to a leaked access key.
cloudShared responsibility, CSPM and CNAPP, identity across AWS, Azure and GCP, logging, data protection, serverless risks and cloud incident response.
appsecOWASP Top 10, injection, XSS, CSRF, SSRF, broken access control, auth and JWT flaws, API security, threat modeling and secure code review.
containersImage hardening, runtime isolation, Pod Security Standards, RBAC, NetworkPolicy, admission control, secrets, escape paths and cluster monitoring.
iamSSO with SAML and OIDC, OAuth2, MFA and passkeys, PAM, Kerberos and Active Directory attacks, lifecycle management and conditional access.
irIR lifecycle, evidence handling, memory and disk forensics, ransomware and business email compromise, cloud IR, containment decisions and reporting.
detectionHypothesis-driven hunting, Sigma and detection as code, ATT&CK coverage, tuning, KQL and SPL, purple teaming and measuring detection quality.
vulnerabilityScanning, CVSS vs EPSS vs KEV, prioritisation, patch SLAs, compensating controls, exceptions, zero-day response and remediation metrics.
pentestScoping and rules of engagement, methodology, web and network testing, Active Directory paths, reporting, and how defenders detect and fix each finding.
cryptoSymmetric vs asymmetric, hashing and password storage, TLS 1.3, certificates and PKI, key management, HSMs, common mistakes and post-quantum readiness.
grcISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, NIST CSF, risk assessment, policies, third-party risk, audits, BCP and DR, and privacy law basics.
malwareStatic and dynamic analysis, packers, persistence, YARA, IOCs vs TTPs, the CTI lifecycle, ATT&CK, Diamond Model and sharing intelligence.
Control plane & etcd, scheduling (requests/affinity/taints), Service/Ingress/CNI/NetworkPolicy, PV/PVC/StorageClass, RBAC, probes, node drain, cluster upgrades, multi-tenancy, Pending/NotReady/eviction debugging.
kafkaTopics/partitions/offsets, consumer groups, replication & ISR, acks + min.insync.replicas, delivery guarantees/EOS, retention vs compaction, consumer lag, rebalancing, broker failure, reassignment & Cruise Control, KRaft.
rabbitmqExchanges/bindings/routing, acks & publisher confirms, durable + persistent, prefetch/QoS, DLX & TTL retries, quorum vs mirrored queues, clustering/vhosts, flow control & watermarks, network partitions/split-brain.