Systems Design: Focusing on scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance. Troubleshooting/Linux: Real-world incident scenarios, analyzing logs, and deep-dive kernel/networking questions. Coding/Automation: Writing robust scripts for infrastructure management. Behavioral/Cultural Fit: Discussing on-call experiences, handling pressure, and "blameless postmortems".

Coding interviewer hit me with "what technical work have you done?" questions that I wasn't expecting since I was focused on coding. Coding was Leetcode. Similar to most tech companies, they want to see how you think. Unfortunately they did not warn me that speaking Mandarin was a "nice to have" skill.