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.

834 questions.

TechnicalMid levelDevOps / Platform Engineer
A pod in Kubernetes keeps restarting in a crash loop right after a deploy. How do you work out what is wrong?
Tests: Containers & Kubernetes
BehaviouralMid levelDevOps / Platform Engineer
Tell me about a time you set up monitoring or alerting that caught a problem before users noticed. What did you measure?
Tests: Observability & monitoring
TechnicalMid levelDevOps / Platform Engineer
Someone changed a production resource by hand, and now your Terraform plan wants to destroy and recreate it. What do you do?
Tests: Infrastructure as code
TechnicalMid levelDevOps / Platform Engineer
How do you handle secrets like database passwords and API keys so they never end up in source code or build logs?
Tests: Cloud infrastructure & security
CaseSeniorDevOps / Platform Engineer
If you were building an internal developer platform from scratch, how would you decide what to standardise and where to leave teams free to choose?
Tests: Developer platform design
TechnicalSeniorDevOps / Platform Engineer
Your company deploys once a week and releases are painful. How would you get it to safe, multiple-times-a-day deploys, and what would you change first?
Tests: CI/CD pipelines
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
BehaviouralAny levelDevOps / Platform Engineer
Tell me about a time developers pushed back on a tool or process your team introduced. How did you handle it, and what changed?
Tests: Collaboration with developers
BehaviouralAny levelDevOps / Platform Engineer
Tell me about an outage or broken deploy you were involved in. What did you do in the moment, and what did you change afterwards?
Tests: Ownership
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
System designSeniorSite Reliability Engineer
How would you design a service so that losing an entire availability zone, or a key dependency, does not take the whole product down?
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
BehaviouralAny levelSite Reliability Engineer
Tell me about the most stressful incident you have worked on. How did you keep yourself and others focused?
Tests: Composure under pressure