Original source: enterprisersproject.com. This article expands on and updates the core questions for a DevOps engineering audience.
Why Hiring a Great DevOps Engineer Is So Difficult
DevOps engineers consistently rank among the most sought-after roles in IT. They occupy a unique intersection of software engineering, systems administration, security awareness, and interpersonal communication. Because they bridge so many disciplines, a resume alone rarely tells you whether a candidate can actually do the job under pressure.
The questions below are designed to surface the behaviours, attitudes, and real-world experience that separate genuinely capable candidates from those who have simply memorized the right buzzwords.
What Makes a Great DevOps Engineer?
DevOps engineers typically come from a background in software or systems engineering. What elevates them is the ability to hold technical and human concerns in the same hand: they can write a Terraform module in the morning and facilitate a cross-team retrospective in the afternoon. They are the connective tissue between development, operations, security, and the business.
With that profile in mind, here are seven interview questions — and the reasoning behind each — that will help you find your next hire.
The 7 Interview Questions
1. How do you factor security into your DevOps process? How have you helped past teams develop greater security awareness?
Why ask this: DevOps automation accelerates delivery — and it can propagate vulnerabilities just as fast. Security must be built into the pipeline from the start (often called a “shift-left” approach), not bolted on after a release.
What a strong answer looks like: The candidate should describe concrete practices rather than abstract principles. Look for references to integrating static analysis (SAST) or dependency scanning tools into CI/CD pipelines, using secrets management solutions (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), enforcing least-privilege IAM policies, or running automated compliance checks as part of the build. Bonus points if they describe how they brought the wider team along — lunch-and-learns, blameless post-mortems, or pairing sessions — because security awareness is a cultural problem as much as a technical one.
Red flag: A candidate who frames security as someone else’s problem (“that’s what the security team is for”) is likely to create gaps in the pipeline.
2. What do you always automate? What do you consciously choose not to automate? Describe a process that was particularly hard to automate.
Why ask this: Automation is the cornerstone of DevOps, but indiscriminate automation creates brittle, hard-to-debug systems. A mature engineer knows where to draw the line.
What a strong answer looks like: Expect fluency with CI/CD platforms (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) and Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible, CloudFormation). More revealing is their answer on what not to automate: one-off migrations, processes with high human-judgment requirements, or situations where the cost of maintaining automation exceeds its benefit. The “hard to automate” question is a storytelling prompt — look for a real anecdote with a concrete problem, the approach taken, and lessons learned.
3. Describe your ideal working environment for a DevOps team. What have you learned from working closely with operations?
Why ask this: DevOps is fundamentally collaborative. A candidate who thrives in isolation, or who dismisses operations concerns as blockers rather than inputs, will struggle.
What a strong answer looks like: Listen for references to psychological safety, shared on-call responsibilities, documented runbooks, and regular cross-functional communication (daily standups, shared dashboards, joint retrospectives). A candidate who has genuinely worked closely with operations will speak to specific tensions they navigated — for example, balancing deployment velocity against change-management processes — and explain how they resolved them collaboratively rather than unilaterally.
4. Tell me about scripts you’ve developed that were critical to your team’s success.
Why ask this: Scripting is the practical multiplier for a DevOps engineer. Even those who are not full software developers need to write reliable, maintainable automation code.
What a strong answer looks like: Strong candidates will have specific examples — not vague statements about “writing a lot of Python.” They should be able to explain the business problem the script solved, why they chose that language (Python, Bash, PowerShell, Go), how they tested and documented it, and how it was handed off so the team could maintain it without them. Maintainability is as important as functionality; ask a follow-up question about how the script was documented or version-controlled.
5. Tell me about a release that went badly wrong. How did you stabilize the environment, and what did you learn?
Why ask this: Incidents are inevitable. How an engineer behaves under pressure — and what they take away from the experience — reveals their professional maturity more than any success story.
What a strong answer looks like: Look for a structured, honest account: what happened, how they diagnosed it, what decision they made under pressure, and what the outcome was. Crucially, listen for a clear “what I learned” section. Did they implement a post-mortem process? Add a missing test? Improve rollback automation? A candidate who blames others or becomes defensive is a warning sign. One who treats the incident as a learning opportunity — and can point to a concrete improvement that resulted — is exactly who you want.
6. How do you measure success — both for yourself and for the DevOps team as a whole?
Why ask this: Without measurable goals, improvement is just a feeling. A DevOps engineer who can define, track, and act on metrics is far more valuable than one who operates on intuition alone.
What a strong answer looks like: Candidates familiar with DevOps measurement will reference metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rate — the four key metrics popularised by the DORA research programme. They should also be able to discuss what baseline they started from, what targets the team set, and how they tracked progress over time. Personal success metrics are equally telling: look for a growth mindset rather than a focus on individual heroics.
7. What are your favourite DevOps tools right now? What new tools or features have you explored recently?
Why ask this: The DevOps toolchain evolves rapidly. An engineer who stopped learning two years ago is already behind. Genuine curiosity is one of the best leading indicators of long-term performance.
What a strong answer looks like: You want specific enthusiasm, not a rehearsed list. A great candidate will explain why a tool works well for them — the problem it solves, the trade-offs compared to alternatives, what they find genuinely elegant about it. The “recently explored” portion is the most revealing: it shows whether they self-direct their learning or wait to be trained. Topics worth listening for include platform engineering, GitOps workflows, eBPF-based observability, AI-assisted coding in the development workflow, or advances in container orchestration and service mesh technology.
Putting It All Together
No single question will surface everything you need to know, but together these seven prompts test the full profile of a high-performing DevOps engineer: security mindset, automation judgement, collaborative instinct, scripting craft, incident resilience, data-driven improvement, and an appetite for continuous learning.
Supplement these behavioural questions with a practical exercise — reviewing a sample CI/CD pipeline, writing a short script, or walking through an architecture diagram — to validate what you hear in conversation. The strongest candidates will welcome the opportunity to show their work.
The DevOps talent market remains competitive. Asking sharper questions is the most reliable way to close the gap between a good-sounding candidate and a great hire.