Interview questions / DevOps Engineer
DevOps Engineer interview questions
These are questions DevOps Engineer candidates often hear, with a short note on what a strong answer covers. Reading them helps; saying your answers out loud helps more.
Describe a CI/CD pipeline you have built or would build.
Walk through build, test, deploy stages, how you roll back, and how long it takes.
A deployment just broke production. What do you do in the first 10 minutes?
Roll back or mitigate first, communicate, then investigate. Show calm order.
How do you manage secrets for applications?
Name a secret manager, least privilege, rotation, and keeping secrets out of code and logs.
What would you monitor for a web service, and what would page you at night?
Separate dashboards from alerts; alert on user-facing symptoms like errors and latency.
Explain infrastructure as code and why teams use it.
Mention repeatability, review, drift and a tool you've used, such as Terraform.
Tell me about a time you automated a manual process.
Give the before and after in time or errors saved.