Interview prep
Systems Administrator interview questions
13 questions systems administrators 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
- How do you approach patching production servers without causing an outage?Tests: patch management, reliability
- Walk me through how you verify that backups would actually work if you needed them.Tests: backup and recovery, reliability
- How do you manage user access so permissions don't quietly accumulate over time?Tests: access control, security
- How do you decide what to monitor and alert on for a server environment you're responsible for?Tests: monitoring, reliability
Situational
- A critical server goes down outside business hours. Walk me through what you do.Tests: incident response, troubleshooting
- You get several urgent requests from different departments at the same time. How do you decide what to handle first?Tests: prioritisation, communication
- Disk space or resource usage on a key system is trending toward a limit. How do you handle it before it becomes an outage?Tests: capacity planning, reliability
Behavioral
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with a coworker and how you handled it.Tests: conflict resolution, communication
- Describe a project or task that did not go well and what you did about it.Tests: ownership, reflection
- Give an example of persuading someone to adopt an idea they initially resisted.Tests: influence, communication
- Walk me through how you decided what to work on when you had more requests than time.Tests: prioritisation, judgment
- 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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