DevOps Engineer 路 Intern to senior
DevOps interviews check that you can ship and run software safely: version control workflows, containers, build pipelines, and how services are scaled, monitored and recovered when something fails.
45 questions
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes to files on your machine; GitHub is a hosting service for Git repositories that adds collaboration features such as pull requests, code review and CI.
git fetch downloads new commits from the remote without changing your working branch; git pull runs a fetch and then merges (or rebases) those commits into your current branch.
A virtual machine runs a full guest operating system on virtualised hardware, while a container shares the host鈥檚 kernel and isolates only the process, its filesystem and resources, which makes containers much lighter and faster to start.
An image is a read-only template made of layers that contains the application and its dependencies; a container is a running (or stopped) instance of an image with its own writable layer on top.
Give a 60-90 second summary in three parts: what you do now, one or two achievements that show your strengths, and why this role is the logical next step.
Connect two or three of your strongest, provable skills directly to the needs in the job description, give a short piece of evidence for each, and show genuine interest in the team鈥檚 work.
Give specific evidence of deliberate learning through projects, feedback, reading, experimentation or mentoring rather than listing technologies.
Connect something specific about the company, product, engineering challenges or team to your own experience and career goals.
Vertical scaling means giving one machine more CPU, memory or disk, while horizontal scaling means adding more machines and spreading the load across them.
Volumes are storage managed by Docker that lives outside a container鈥檚 writable layer, so data such as database files survives when the container is removed or replaced.
A load balancer distributes incoming requests across several servers to improve capacity and availability, using algorithms such as round robin, least connections or consistent hashing.
Both integrate changes from one branch into another: merge keeps both histories and joins them with a merge commit, while rebase rewrites your commits so they appear on top of the target branch, giving a linear history.
Open the conflicted files, decide what the final code should be between the conflict markers, remove the markers, run the tests, then stage the files and continue the merge or rebase.
Use a small, pinned base image, order instructions so dependencies are cached before source code, use multi-stage builds to leave build tools out of the final image, run as a non-root user and keep secrets out of the image.
Choose a real project with a technical or organisational challenge, explain your specific role and decisions with the STAR method, and finish with the result and what you learned.
Walk through how you noticed the issue, limited the impact, found the root cause, fixed it, and what you changed afterwards so the same class of bug could not happen again.
Choose a real mistake, take ownership, explain the impact, what you did to recover, and what you changed so it would not happen again.
Describe feedback that was uncomfortable but useful, explain how you responded, and show the measurable or observable improvement that followed.
Choose a genuine failure, explain why it failed, what you owned, how you recovered, and what you changed in future projects.
Show how you prioritized the essential outcome, communicated trade-offs, reduced risk and delivered without pretending everything could be done.