Engineering · 2026 Guide

DevOps Engineer Interview Questions

DevOps / Platform Engineer interviews focus on cloud architecture, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, observability, and incident response. Expect coding (scripting), system design, and a deep cloud round.

Questions
10 curated
Salary Range
$130k – $240k
Experience
2–10+ yrs
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Core Interview Topics

DevOps Engineer interviews at top tech companies typically assess these competency areas:

CI/CDKubernetesIaC (Terraform)Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)ObservabilityIncident Response

Top 10 DevOps Engineer Interview Questions

These questions are drawn from real interview loops at FAANG and top-tier tech companies in 2025–2026. Click Practice now to run a full AI mock session for any question.

  1. 1

    Design a multi-region active-active deployment strategy.

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  2. 2

    Write a Terraform module for a VPC + EKS cluster + RDS.

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  3. 3

    How do you handle secrets in a Kubernetes cluster?

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  4. 4

    Diagnose: pods are CrashLoopBackOff in prod but fine in staging.

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  5. 5

    Compare blue-green vs canary vs rolling deploys.

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  6. 6

    Build a CI pipeline that runs tests, builds, scans, and deploys with manual approval.

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  7. 7

    How do you achieve four-nines uptime for a payment service?

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  8. 8

    Walk me through your biggest production incident — RCA, action items, lessons.

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  9. 9

    Design a logging + tracing stack for a 200-service microservices estate.

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  10. 10

    When would you use service mesh? Istio vs Linkerd vs no mesh?

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How to Prepare

  • Be deep on one cloud (usually AWS) and know one other at a working level.
  • Practice writing Terraform from a blank file in 20 minutes.
  • Have war stories ready — interviewers want to hear how you act under pressure.
  • Know SLO/SLI/SLA vocabulary cold.

ATS Resume Keywords

Include these high-signal keywords in your DevOps Engineer resume to pass ATS filters at top companies.

KubernetesTerraformAWSGCPHelmArgoCDGitHub ActionsPrometheusGrafanaDatadogLinuxBash

Resume must-haves for DevOps Engineer:

  • Uptime / MTTR metrics
  • Cost-savings numbers
  • Cluster scale (nodes, pods)
  • Incident-response stories