A hiring manager's question bank for DevOps engineers. Use these to find people who can keep production up at 3am, not just ones who can recite the names of tools.
DevOps interviews are uniquely tricky because the role spans so much: build and deployment pipelines, containers and orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, observability, the Linux fundamentals underneath it all, and — most importantly — how someone behaves when production is on fire. The failure mode is hiring a "tool tourist" who can list Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and Prometheus on a resume but has never actually debugged a failing rollout or written an idempotent Terraform module that didn't recreate a database on apply. The questions below are built to get past the buzzword layer. They ask candidates to walk through a CI/CD pipeline they actually built, explain what really happens when a Kubernetes pod is stuck in `CrashLoopBackOff`, describe how they'd structure Terraform state so a teammate doesn't clobber it, and — crucially — narrate a real incident from alert to root cause to postmortem. That last category matters most: DevOps is judged on reliability, and the best candidates treat incidents as learning systems, write blameless postmortems, and automate away the toil that caused the last outage. For a strong read, combine one pipeline question, one containers/orchestration question, one infrastructure-as-code question, and one incident-response scenario. Look for people who think in terms of automation, repeatability, and failure recovery — who reach for "how do we make sure this never pages us again" rather than a one-off manual fix — and who can explain a Linux or networking issue down to the actual mechanism, not just the command they Googled.
Pick six to eight questions across pipelines, infrastructure, and incident response rather than running the whole list. The incident-response scenario is the most revealing — give a candidate room to walk through it end to end and watch how they reason under simulated pressure.
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