Top 30 Interview Questions & Answers for DevOps Engineer – 2025

In 2025, DevOps Engineers are expected to bridge the gap between development and operations through automation, continuous integration, cloud-native practices, and a deep understanding of modern infrastructure. Below is a curated set of behavioral, situational, technical, and cultural fit interview questions with well-crafted answers to help candidates prepare with confidence.

Behavioral Questions

• 1. Tell me about a challenging incident where you resolved a deployment issue.
  You identified a faulty configuration in the CI/CD pipeline causing rollbacks and fixed it by adding validation scripts before deployment.
• 2. Describe a time when you collaborated with developers to solve a system outage.
  You facilitated a joint war-room call, traced the issue to a misconfigured DNS entry, and implemented automated health checks.
• 3. How do you handle a high-pressure release deadline?
  You prioritize automation and parallel testing to speed up processes while maintaining quality assurance under pressure.
• 4. Share a time when you introduced a new DevOps tool or practice.
  You introduced GitOps using ArgoCD to manage Kubernetes deployments, improving rollback and visibility.
• 5. Have you ever had to convince a team to adopt automation?
  You showcased ROI metrics of manual vs. automated testing and gradually onboarded them through workshops and POCs.

Situational Questions

• 6. If a deployment breaks production, what would be your first step?
  You’d initiate a rollback using version control and CI/CD logs, then diagnose logs and metrics to identify the root cause.
• 7. How would you manage multiple feature releases across environments?
  You’d use feature flags and environment-based configurations to isolate releases safely.
• 8. You notice your CI pipeline has slowed down significantly. What do you do?
  You analyze pipeline stages using logs and telemetry, parallelize builds, and cache dependencies to improve performance.
• 9. A developer wants full access to the production server. What’s your response?
  You enforce least-privilege policies, offering temporary elevated permissions only if justified, and through approval workflows.
• 10. Your team is resistant to monitoring and alerting best practices. How do you encourage change?
  You demonstrate how proactive alerting can prevent downtime and reduce firefighting by sharing past incident reports.

Technical Questions

• 11. What tools do you use for CI/CD?
  Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, and ArgoCD for GitOps-based deployments.
• 12. Explain Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
  IaC is managing infrastructure through code (like Terraform or CloudFormation), enabling versioning, automation, and consistency.
• 13. What’s your approach to container orchestration?
  You use Kubernetes to manage containers, with Helm for packaging and operators for custom resource management.
• 14. How do you ensure zero-downtime deployments?
  You implement blue-green or canary deployments with health checks and gradual traffic shifting.
• 15. What logging and monitoring tools do you use?
  Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, ELK/EFK stack for logging, and Alertmanager or PagerDuty for alerting.
• 16. How do you manage secrets in DevOps workflows?
  You use tools like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Kubernetes Secrets with RBAC controls.
• 17. Describe your typical CI pipeline structure.
  Code checkout → Build → Unit Test → Static Code Analysis → Package → Integration Test → Deploy to Staging → Deploy to Prod.
• 18. What are blue-green deployments?
  They involve maintaining two environments (blue and green) where one serves live traffic while the other is tested and updated.
• 19. What’s the role of Docker in DevOps?
  Docker provides consistent runtime environments, ensuring that apps run identically across dev, test, and production.
• 20. How do you handle system scalability in the cloud?
  You use autoscaling groups, load balancers, and horizontal pod autoscaling in Kubernetes based on CPU/memory thresholds.

Cultural Fit Questions

• 21. Why did you choose a career in DevOps?
  You enjoy solving problems by combining development, automation, and infrastructure into streamlined systems.
• 22. How do you stay updated with DevOps trends?
  By following communities like CNCF, DevOps Weekly, attending webinars, and experimenting with new tools in personal projects.
• 23. How do you ensure communication between cross-functional teams?
  You schedule regular stand-ups, use shared dashboards, and integrate feedback loops into deployment processes.
• 24. What’s your approach to documentation?
  You maintain version-controlled documentation in Markdown, integrated into the repo with clear steps and diagrams.
• 25. How do you contribute to team morale during high-pressure situations?
  You stay calm, delegate tasks fairly, and keep a focus on solutions while encouraging team wins post-resolution.

Additional Questions

• 26. What is the difference between continuous integration and continuous delivery?
  CI involves regularly merging code changes and testing them, while CD ensures the changes are ready for production deployment automatically.
• 27. How do you handle configuration drift?
  By enforcing IaC principles and regularly auditing environments to identify and fix differences.
• 28. What’s the role of a service mesh in DevOps?
  It manages microservices communication, offering observability, traffic control, and secure service-to-service communication (e.g., Istio, Linkerd).
• 29. How do you approach disaster recovery planning?
  You define RTO and RPO, automate backup routines, test failovers regularly, and document runbooks for recovery.
• 30. Describe a time you mentored a junior DevOps engineer.
  You guided them through Docker fundamentals, helped them build their first pipeline, and reviewed code to promote best practices.