Not every hire is a Kubernetes specialist or a GPU engineer. Sometimes you need someone who can figure out why a service won't start, find what filled the disk, kill the right process, or fix a broken config file. Parium has assessments for the general Linux and operations skills that underpin every infrastructure role.
These are the skills that separate someone who can operate systems from someone who has only read documentation. Every infrastructure engineer uses these tools, and the muscle memory shows.
Each scenario drops the candidate into a real Linux terminal with a pre-configured problem. Straightforward incidents that test whether someone can actually operate the system.
An API gateway service has stopped responding. Health checks are failing. The candidate investigates the service status, reads logs, identifies a configuration error, fixes the config file, restarts the service, and verifies recovery. The kind of problem that happens weekly.
A server's root partition is 100% full. Services are failing to write logs, databases can't create temp files, and the system is degrading. Candidate needs to identify what consumed the space (logs, core dumps, temp files, or a runaway process), reclaim space safely, and restore service health.
A server is running at 100% CPU. Applications are unresponsive. The candidate identifies the runaway process, determines whether it's safe to kill (is it a production service or a stuck script?), terminates it correctly, and verifies the system has recovered.
A containerised application is unhealthy. Docker says the container is running but the health check is failing. The candidate inspects logs, exec into the container, identifies the issue (misconfigured env var, missing mount, wrong port binding), fixes it, and verifies the service is responding.
A production server's response times have doubled. Nothing has been deployed recently. The candidate investigates CPU, memory, I/O, and network metrics to find the bottleneck, identifies the root cause (memory leak, I/O contention, or noisy neighbour), and applies the right fix.
A server has been flagged by a security scan. Candidate needs to review SSH configuration, user permissions, open ports, running services, file permissions, and firewall rules. Tests whether they can identify misconfigurations, apply fixes, and verify the hardening without breaking the application.
If your team uses specific tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef), specific application stacks (Nginx, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Redis), or has specific operational procedures, we can build scenarios that test exactly what your engineers deal with day to day.