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DevOps Engineer Interview Kit

A complete interview kit to evaluate senior DevOps candidates on automation, cloud, CI/CD, observability, and cultural fit.

Questions

43

Duration

2-3 hours

Difficulty

Senior

Used By

500+ teams

PDF Format
1,049 downloads

Technical DevOps Knowledge

Evaluate candidate's expertise in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, automation, and reliability engineering.

11 questions

−

Question 1: Explain the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. How would you implement each?

What to Look For

  • • Clear differentiation between CI, CD (delivery), and CD (deployment)
  • • Knowledge of pipelines and automation tools
  • • Real-world examples of implementation
  • • Awareness of testing gates and approvals
  • • Focus on automation and reliability

Red Flags

  • • Confuses terms
  • • No practical implementation knowledge
  • • Dismisses testing importance
  • • Overly academic, no real projects

Follow-up Questions

  • • What CI/CD tools have you used?
  • • How do you add approval gates?
  • • What risks come with full auto-deployment?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains CI vs CD clearly, gives tool examples (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), discusses testing and approvals.
Good (7-8):Understands basics, some examples.
Average (5-6):Knows CI/CD generally but vague.
Poor (1-4):Confused or incorrect.

Question 2: How do you design a highly available system across multiple cloud regions?

What to Look For

  • • Understanding of multi-region architecture
  • • Knowledge of load balancing, DNS, failover
  • • Awareness of replication and data consistency
  • • Cost vs availability trade-offs
  • • Real project experience

Red Flags

  • • No awareness of regional failures
  • • Focuses only on load balancers
  • • No consideration of DB replication
  • • No mention of costs or trade-offs

Follow-up Questions

  • • How would you handle stateful services?
  • • How do you test failover?
  • • Which cloud providers have you implemented this on?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains multi-region HA with LB, DNS, replication, failover tests, and trade-offs.
Good (7-8):Knows HA basics.
Average (5-6):Superficial.
Poor (1-4):No clue.

Question 3: What are Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles, and how have you applied them?

What to Look For

  • • Knowledge of declarative vs imperative IaC
  • • Tools like Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi
  • • Version control of infra
  • • Reproducibility benefits
  • • Real application in projects

Red Flags

  • • Thinks IaC is just scripts
  • • No awareness of version control
  • • No experience with tools
  • • No benefits mentioned

Follow-up Questions

  • • What IaC tools have you used?
  • • How do you handle drift?
  • • What's your preferred approach?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains declarative IaC, version control, tools, reproducibility, examples.
Good (7-8):Mentions tools and basics.
Average (5-6):Knows IaC term only.
Poor (1-4):No clue.

Question 4: How do you monitor and alert for a Kubernetes-based microservices system?

What to Look For

  • • Use of Prometheus, Grafana, ELK
  • • Awareness of metrics, logs, tracing
  • • Alerting on SLOs/SLIs
  • • Experience debugging K8s clusters
  • • Real-world troubleshooting example

Red Flags

  • • No K8s monitoring knowledge
  • • Focuses only on logs
  • • No awareness of tracing
  • • No mention of SLOs

Follow-up Questions

  • • What tools do you prefer for tracing?
  • • How do you prevent alert fatigue?
  • • How do you measure reliability?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains metrics, logs, tracing, Prometheus, Grafana, alerting, with production examples.
Good (7-8):Knows tools and basics.
Average (5-6):Superficial knowledge.
Poor (1-4):No clue.

Question 5: How do you implement secrets management in production environments?

What to Look For

  • • Awareness of Vault, AWS Secrets Manager
  • • No hardcoding of secrets
  • • Rotation strategies
  • • Access controls (least privilege)
  • • Audit logging

Red Flags

  • • Suggests hardcoding secrets
  • • Stores in config files
  • • No rotation plan
  • • No mention of access controls

Follow-up Questions

  • • What tools have you used?
  • • How often should secrets rotate?
  • • How do you handle developer access?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains Vault/Secrets Manager, rotation, access control, audit logs.
Good (7-8):Mentions tool and basics.
Average (5-6):Knows not to hardcode.
Poor (1-4):Unsafe practices.

Question 6: What strategies do you use for zero-downtime deployments?

What to Look For

  • • Blue/green, canary releases
  • • Rolling updates
  • • Awareness of DB migrations
  • • Monitoring after deploy
  • • Rollback strategies

Red Flags

  • • Suggests just "deploy at night"
  • • No rollback plan
  • • No awareness of DB impact
  • • No monitoring

Follow-up Questions

  • • Which method do you prefer?
  • • How do you handle migrations?
  • • How do you test rollbacks?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains blue/green, canary, rolling, DB migrations, rollback plans.
Good (7-8):Mentions one deployment strategy.
Average (5-6):Superficial.
Poor (1-4):Unsafe or naive.

Question 7: How do you optimize cloud costs in AWS or GCP for a large-scale system?

What to Look For

  • • Rightsizing instances
  • • Use of autoscaling
  • • Reserved vs spot instances
  • • Storage optimizations
  • • Cost monitoring dashboards

Red Flags

  • • No awareness of FinOps
  • • Focuses only on instance type
  • • No monitoring
  • • No real strategies

Follow-up Questions

  • • Have you used AWS Cost Explorer?
  • • How do you justify spend to leadership?
  • • What was your biggest cost saving?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Lists multiple strategies with examples, mentions FinOps, dashboards.
Good (7-8):Mentions 2-3 strategies.
Average (5-6):Generic answer.
Poor (1-4):No knowledge.

Question 8: Explain disaster recovery (DR) vs high availability (HA). How would you implement each in AWS?

What to Look For

  • • Clear differentiation between DR and HA
  • • Knowledge of RTO and RPO
  • • Multi-region failover vs backups
  • • Examples using AWS services (Route53, S3, RDS, CloudFormation)
  • • Testing recovery plans

Red Flags

  • • Confuses HA with DR
  • • No AWS knowledge
  • • No mention of testing
  • • Superficial answers

Follow-up Questions

  • • How do you test a DR plan?
  • • What AWS tools would you use for replication?
  • • What trade-offs exist between cost and resilience?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains RTO/RPO, uses AWS services for HA + DR, mentions testing and cost trade-offs.
Good (7-8):Understands difference and basics.
Average (5-6):Knows terms but vague on implementation.
Poor (1-4):Confused or no knowledge.

Question 9: How do you implement observability in a microservices system?

What to Look For

  • • Three pillars: metrics, logs, tracing
  • • Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, ELK
  • • Correlation IDs
  • • SLIs/SLOs/SLAs awareness
  • • Examples from production

Red Flags

  • • No awareness of tracing
  • • Focuses only on logs
  • • No SLO awareness
  • • No tool knowledge

Follow-up Questions

  • • What's the difference between observability and monitoring?
  • • What metrics do you track?
  • • How do you prevent alert fatigue?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains metrics/logs/tracing, tools, SLOs, correlation IDs, with real examples.
Good (7-8):Knows pillars and some tools.
Average (5-6):Generic monitoring only.
Poor (1-4):No clue.

Question 10: How do you secure containers running in production?

What to Look For

  • • Scanning images for vulnerabilities
  • • Principle of least privilege
  • • Network policies
  • • Runtime monitoring
  • • Experience with tools (Aqua, Falco, Trivy)

Red Flags

  • • Runs containers as root
  • • No mention of scanning
  • • No runtime security
  • • Superficial

Follow-up Questions

  • • How do you scan container images?
  • • What about Kubernetes pod security policies?
  • • How do you handle secrets inside containers?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Mentions scanning, least privilege, policies, monitoring, with tool experience.
Good (7-8):Knows basics, some tools.
Average (5-6):Generic answer.
Poor (1-4):Unsafe practices.

Question 11: How do you detect and fix infrastructure drift?

What to Look For

  • • Knowledge of IaC drift
  • • Tools like Terraform plan, AWS Config
  • • Automated drift detection
  • • Alerts and remediation
  • • Examples in production

Red Flags

  • • No awareness of drift
  • • Manual fixes only
  • • No monitoring
  • • No IaC experience

Follow-up Questions

  • • What tools have you used?
  • • How do you auto-remediate drift?
  • • What risks does drift cause?

Scoring Guide

Excellent (9-10):Explains drift, detection tools, auto-remediation, examples.
Good (7-8):Knows drift basics and a tool.
Average (5-6):Basic awareness.
Poor (1-4):No clue.

Behavioral Questions

Understand how candidates handle challenges, collaboration, and leadership.

10 questions

+

Situational Questions

Assess ability to handle real-world DevOps challenges.

11 questions

+

Culture & Collaboration

Evaluate adaptability, teamwork, and alignment with DevOps culture.

9 questions

+

Complete DevOps Engineer Interview Kit

Get all interview questions with scoring guides, red flags, and follow-up questions in a professionally formatted PDF.

PDF • 15 pages2.4 MBUpdated Dec 19, 2025
PDF Format
1,110 downloads

🎯 How to Use This Interview Kit

  1. 1.Review all questions before the interview to understand the evaluation criteria
  2. 2.Select 8-12 questions based on the role's specific requirements and interview time
  3. 3.Use the scoring guide to objectively evaluate each answer
  4. 4.Take detailed notes on specific examples and behaviors mentioned
  5. 5.Use follow-up questions to probe deeper when needed
  6. 6.Compare candidates using the standardized scoring system

DevOps Engineer Interview Kit - Complete Interview Kit

Download all questions, evaluation criteria, and scoring guides in a beautifully formatted PDF. Perfect for interview preparation and team alignment.

PDF • 9 pages2.4 MBUpdated Dec 19, 2025
PDF Format
1,226 downloads

Interview Best Practices

✅ Do's

  • • Take detailed notes during the interview
  • • Ask follow-up questions to dig deeper
  • • Give candidates time to think
  • • Use the scoring guide consistently
  • • Document specific examples from answers

❌ Don'ts

  • • Don't rush through questions
  • • Don't ask illegal or discriminatory questions
  • • Don't make snap judgments
  • • Don't forget to sell your company
  • • Don't skip the candidate's questions

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