1 min lesson
What 'qualified' means here
Use "The bar is a functioning senior IC who ships from week one" to say what a strong answer must include.
Step 1 of 3
The bar is a functioning senior IC who ships from week one. Not a strong junior to be grown, not a manager who architects from a distance - someone who can be handed an ambiguous infra problem and return working, reproducible systems.
Read the requirements honestly against your own history before you read them aspirationally. The loop will find the gap; better that you find it first and decide how to handle it.
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Advanced table
The required column is table stakes
- Area
- AWS depth
- Required bar
- VPC networking, EKS/Kubernetes, IAM from real production use
- Nice-to-have
- Multi-cloud breadth
- Area
- K8s at scale
- Required bar
- Operated production clusters with a service mesh and multi-region deployments
- Nice-to-have
- Karpenter, advanced mesh tuning (sidecarless)
- Area
- Edge networking
- Required bar
- CDN/WAF architecture: rate limiting, DDoS/abuse protection, routing
- Nice-to-have
- Anycast and global LB design at scale
- Area
- Infrastructure-as-code
- Required bar
- Terraform/Pulumi with a reproducibility-first mindset
- Nice-to-have
- Progressive/safe rollout of infra changes, drift control
- Area
- SWE fundamentals
- Required bar
- Write real production code (Go/Rust/TS/Python), not just config
- Nice-to-have
- Strong CS fundamentals under a no-AI time box
- Area
- Cost engineering
- Required bar
- Awareness of cost-vs-reliability tradeoffs
- Nice-to-have
- Attribution/chargeback and waste identification at scale
- Area
- Migration
- Required bar
- -
- Nice-to-have
- Infrastructure migration and platform-unification experience
| Area | Required bar | Nice-to-have |
|---|---|---|
| AWS depth | VPC networking, EKS/Kubernetes, IAM from real production use | Multi-cloud breadth |
| K8s at scale | Operated production clusters with a service mesh and multi-region deployments | Karpenter, advanced mesh tuning (sidecarless) |
| Edge networking | CDN/WAF architecture: rate limiting, DDoS/abuse protection, routing | Anycast and global LB design at scale |
| Infrastructure-as-code | Terraform/Pulumi with a reproducibility-first mindset | Progressive/safe rollout of infra changes, drift control |
| SWE fundamentals | Write real production code (Go/Rust/TS/Python), not just config | Strong CS fundamentals under a no-AI time box |
| Cost engineering | Awareness of cost-vs-reliability tradeoffs | Attribution/chargeback and waste identification at scale |
| Migration | - | Infrastructure migration and platform-unification experience |
The required column is table stakes. The nice-to-haves are where you differentiate - and where the cost and migration pillars live.
"Strong SWE fundamentals" is not filler on an infra JD. The no-AI phone screen is a real coding round, so you must write clean production code under a time box without AI assistance - config fluency alone won't clear it. Many infra candidates underweight this and lose the loop on the screen.