- Stages
- 5
- Typical timeline
- 3 to 5 weeks
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Format
- Technical screen, troubleshooting, design and behavioural rounds
DevOps and SRE interviews test how you build and run reliable infrastructure. Expect questions on Linux, networking, cloud services, containers and orchestration, infrastructure as code and continuous delivery, along with troubleshooting scenarios where something is broken and you talk through how you would find the cause. Many companies include a coding round focused on scripting and automation, and a design round on building a reliable deployment pipeline or monitoring setup. Interviewers value calm, methodical debugging, clear thinking about failure and a habit of automating repeated work.
The interview process, stage by stage
- Recruiter screenCloud platforms, tools and scale of systems you have run.
- Technical screenLinux, networking and scripting questions.
- TroubleshootingLive scenario: a service is down or slow, find out why.
- Infrastructure designDesign a deployment pipeline, monitoring or a resilient setup.
- BehaviouralIncidents, on-call and working with development teams.
How you're scored
Strong grasp of Linux, networking and how services run.
Methodical debugging under pressure.
Builds repeatable, tested infrastructure rather than manual fixes.
Designs for failure and measures reliability sensibly.
Likely DevOps Engineer interview questions
A web service is returning 502 errors. Walk me through how you'd investigate.
A strong answer includes: Check scope and recent deploys, then the load balancer and its health checks, application logs and process status, upstream dependencies and resource limits, narrowing down step by step.
Design a CI/CD pipeline for a service with several environments.
A strong answer includes: Build once, run tests and security checks, promote the same artefact through environments, use automated deployment with canary or blue-green releases and fast rollback.
Explain how Kubernetes schedules and restarts a pod.
A strong answer includes: The scheduler places pods using resource requests and constraints, the kubelet runs them, and probes plus the controller restart or replace failed pods.
Every question for this interview, with what strong answers include. Free with an account for the first few; all of them with Pro.
Common mistakes
- Guessing at causes instead of narrowing down systematically
- Relying on manual steps in a pipeline design
- Alerting on everything rather than on user impact
- Not knowing the basics beneath the tools
Questions to ask them
- How are reliability targets set and tracked?
- What does incident review look like here?
- How much of the infrastructure is defined as code?
- What is the biggest operational pain point today?
Candidate experiences
No candidate reports for this interview yet. Interviewed recently? Share what they asked and help the next candidate.
Share your interviewFrequently asked questions
What questions are asked in a DevOps interview?
Linux and networking fundamentals, containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, cloud services, monitoring, and troubleshooting scenarios. Many interviews include scripting in Python or Bash.
What is the difference between DevOps and SRE interviews?
They overlap heavily. SRE interviews often add more software engineering and reliability concepts such as service level objectives and error budgets, while DevOps interviews may focus more on pipelines and tooling.
How do I answer troubleshooting questions?
Clarify the symptoms and scope, check recent changes, then work from the user outward: DNS, load balancer, application, dependencies and resources. Say which commands or dashboards you would use and why, and narrow the cause step by step.
What are SLOs and why do interviewers ask about them?
A service level objective is a target for reliability, such as 99.9% of requests succeeding. Interviewers ask to see whether you measure reliability from the user's point of view and use error budgets to balance shipping speed with stability.