Interview prep

DevOps Engineer interview questions

13 questions devops engineers get asked, grouped by type. Under each one are the skills it is really testing, so you can pick a story from your own work that shows them.

Technical

  1. A deployment pipeline that's worked reliably for months suddenly starts failing intermittently. How do you approach it?
    Tests: debugging, reliability
  2. Walk me through how you'd design a deployment process so a bad release can be rolled back quickly.
    Tests: reliability, system design
  3. How do you handle secrets, such as API keys or database credentials, across development, staging, and production environments?
    Tests: security, system design
  4. How do you deploy a new version of a service without users noticing any downtime?
    Tests: reliability, system design

Situational

  1. An automated alert fires at night saying a service is close to running out of disk space or memory. Walk me through what you do.
    Tests: reliability, incident response
  2. You discover that production infrastructure no longer matches what's defined in your infrastructure-as-code. How do you handle it?
    Tests: system design, attention to detail
  3. Cloud costs jumped sharply in a way nobody planned for. How do you find out why and respond?
    Tests: cost management, debugging
  4. A new engineer joins the team and needs access to several systems. How do you approach granting that access?
    Tests: security, process

Behavioral

  1. Tell me about a time you disagreed with a coworker and how you handled it.
    Tests: conflict resolution, communication
  2. Describe a project or task that did not go well and what you did about it.
    Tests: ownership, reflection
  3. Give an example of persuading someone to adopt an idea they initially resisted.
    Tests: influence, communication
  4. Walk me through how you decided what to work on when you had more requests than time.
    Tests: prioritisation, judgment
  5. Tell me about a time you had to learn something new quickly to get a job done.
    Tests: learning agility, ownership
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DevOps Engineer interview questions — Gurus Consulting