IBM Cloud & AI Engineer Interview Experience

Experience: 6 Years
Current Company: Flipkart
Role: Cloud & AI Engineer
Location: Bengaluru
I recently went through the interview process for a Cloud & AI Engineer position at IBM, Bengaluru.

Round 1 - Technical Interview

The first round was primarily focused on my professional experience, project architecture and technical fundamentals. Unlike a typical DSA-heavy interview, the discussion leaned more towards practical engineering knowledge.

Project and Experience Discussion

The interviewer started by asking about my current responsibilities and recent projects. I was asked to explain the high-level design, architecture and my individual contributions.

I discussed my experience working on fleet telemetry, observability and event-driven systems. The interviewer wanted to understand the actual implementation and the engineering decisions behind the projects.

Docker and Kubernetes

We then moved to containerization and orchestration concepts. The questions focused on Docker and Kubernetes fundamentals, along with my hands-on experience using these technologies.

Coding Questions

I was given two coding problems:

• Insert a node at the Kth position in a linked list.

• Merge two sorted arrays without using extra space.

I was able to solve both questions successfully and cleared the first round.

Round 2 - Technical Interview

The second round went deeper into my project experience and covered several areas of cloud infrastructure, Linux, networking, security and AI.

Here are the topics and questions discussed during the interview.

1. Projects and Linux

• Explain your recent projects and the architectural decisions involved.

• What is Linux inotify, and where have you used it?

• What happens when inotify generates duplicate notifications?

2. Cloud and Kubernetes

• How is Kubernetes different from OKE?

• What is Helm?

• How do Helm charts simplify application deployments in Kubernetes?

3. Networking and Security

• What are the differences between REST and gRPC?

• TLS vs mTLS - how do they differ?

• How does certificate verification work?

• Why does a browser sometimes display a certificate warning with an Advanced/Proceed option?

4. AI and Vector Databases

This section focused on vector databases and semantic search.

• What is a vector database?

• Where have you used vector databases?

• How does semantic similarity work?

• How would a system differentiate between Saswat and saswat and determine which one is more relevant?

5. Coding Question

The final coding problem was:

I was able to solve this problem successfully.

Unfortunately, I wasn't selected after the second technical round.