DevOps Engineer Interview Questions and Answers (2026)

Every question below opens to a full page: a quick answer you could give under pressure, what the interviewer is really probing, how to structure your response, a first-person example answer, and the follow-ups that usually come next. Work through your weakest category first.

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CI CD

Walk me through how you would design a CI/CD pipeline for a service t...Answer + example

Deployment

Explain blue green deployment versus canary releases, and when you wo...Answer + example What is GitOps, and how does it differ from a push based deployment?Answer + example

Infrastructure As Code

How does Terraform state work, and how do you manage it across a team?Answer + example How do you detect and deal with infrastructure drift?Answer + example

Containers

How do you keep container images small and secure?Answer + example

Kubernetes

How does the Kubernetes scheduler decide where a pod runs?Answer + example What is the difference between a liveness probe and a readiness probe?Answer + example How do you set CPU and memory requests and limits for a workload?Answer + example

Security

How do you handle secrets in a build and deployment pipeline?Answer + example How do you secure your software supply chain?Answer + example

Observability

What does good observability look like for a service you own?Answer + example

Reliability

Explain SLIs, SLOs and error budgets, and how you would use them day...Answer + example

Infrastructure

What does immutable infrastructure mean in practice, and why does it...Answer + example

Linux

A Linux box shows a load average of 40 but CPU utilization is only te...Answer + example

Databases

How would you ship a breaking database schema change with zero downtime?Answer + example

Scenario

The pager just went off and production is degraded. Walk me through y...Answer + example A deploy went out an hour ago and error rates have been climbing sinc...Answer + example The cloud bill jumped sixty percent this month. How do you find out why?Answer + example Your CI pipeline is flaky and the team has started retrying red build...Answer + example Marketing is running a campaign on Friday that could bring twenty tim...Answer + example How would you move a hand configured legacy VM service into containers?Answer + example

Process

How would you set up an on call rotation for a team of six?Answer + example What makes a good postmortem?Answer + example

Tooling

How do you decide between Terraform, a configuration management tool,...Answer + example

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