Question bank

Interview questions, with guidance on how to answer

834 questions across 64 roles. Open one to see what a strong answer includes and common slips, then drill it out loud with Ava. New to answer structure? Start with the learning hub.

572 questions match your filters.

TechnicalSeniorDevOps / Platform Engineer
Cloud costs have grown forty percent this year with no clear owner. How would you find the waste and stop it creeping back?
Tests: Cloud infrastructure & security
TechnicalEntry levelSite Reliability Engineer
What is the difference between a service level indicator, a service level objective and a service level agreement, and why would a team care about the difference?
Tests: SLOs & error budgets
TechnicalEntry levelSite Reliability Engineer
A Linux server is suddenly very slow. What are the first things you would check, and what would each one tell you?
Tests: Systems troubleshooting
TechnicalEntry levelSite Reliability Engineer
You are on call, and at two in the morning you get paged that the checkout page is returning errors. What do you do in the first ten minutes?
Tests: Incident response
TechnicalMid levelSite Reliability Engineer
How do you decide what deserves to page a human at night versus what can wait for a ticket in the morning?
Tests: Observability & alerting
TechnicalMid levelSite Reliability Engineer
Your service has burned most of its error budget halfway through the month. What happens next, and how do you talk to the product team about it?
Tests: SLOs & error budgets
TechnicalMid levelSite Reliability Engineer
Tell me about a repetitive operational task you automated away. How did you decide it was worth it, and what did you build?
Tests: Automation & coding
TechnicalMid levelSite Reliability Engineer
Latency for one API has doubled, but CPU and memory look normal. How would you narrow down the cause?
Tests: Systems troubleshooting
TechnicalSeniorSite Reliability Engineer
A big marketing launch is expected to triple traffic in six weeks. How would you prepare the system and prove it is ready?
Tests: Capacity & resilience design
TechnicalSeniorSite Reliability Engineer
After a major outage, how do you run a postmortem so people are honest, and how do you make sure the action items actually get done?
Tests: Incident response
TechnicalEntry levelCloud Engineer
If you had to host a simple web app with a database in the cloud, which services would you pick, and why?
Tests: Cloud architecture & core services
TechnicalEntry levelCloud Engineer
What does least privilege mean in cloud access management, and how would you apply it to a new developer joining the team?
Tests: Identity & access management
TechnicalEntry levelCloud Engineer
Explain the difference between a public and a private subnet, and what kinds of resources you would put in each.
Tests: Cloud networking
TechnicalMid levelCloud Engineer
An app server in a private subnet cannot reach an external payment service. How do you troubleshoot that connection?
Tests: Cloud networking
TechnicalMid levelCloud Engineer
How do you structure infrastructure code so several teams and environments can reuse it without stepping on each other?
Tests: Infrastructure as code
TechnicalMid levelCloud Engineer
How would you set up backups for a production database, and how would you prove they actually restore?
Tests: Reliability & disaster recovery
TechnicalSeniorCloud Engineer
Leadership asks for a disaster recovery plan for a critical system. How do you decide recovery time and data loss targets, and what design follows?
Tests: Reliability & disaster recovery
TechnicalSeniorCloud Engineer
How would you set up accounts, permissions and guardrails across dozens of teams so they move fast but cannot create risky public resources?
Tests: Identity & access management
TechnicalEntry levelSecurity Engineer
What is SQL injection, how does it happen, and how would you prevent it in a web application?
Tests: Application security
TechnicalEntry levelSecurity Engineer
Why is multi-factor authentication important, and which kinds of second factor are stronger than others?
Tests: Identity & access control