DevOps Engineer Interview Questions
372 questions across 38 categories
The bulk of a working DevOps engineer's day-to-day: hands-on tooling, common troubleshooting, and the practical judgment calls that come up once you're actually operating systems.
Why does Google recommend uniform bucket-level access over fine-grained ACLs, and what actually breaks when you enable it on an existing bucket?
IntermediateGCPCloud Storage6 min
What's the actual difference between git fetch and git pull, and why do some teams recommend always fetching first?
BeginnerGit5 min
Two engineers are working on the same long-lived feature branch. One wants to rebase onto main daily, the other insists on merging main in. Who's right, and how do you decide?
BeginnerGit8 min
What's the actual difference between git merge and git rebase in terms of what happens to the commit graph, not just the end result you see?
BeginnerGit6 min
A teammate's work was lost after a force-push overwrote their commits on a shared branch. How would you recover it?
IntermediateGit7 min
When would you choose squash-merge over a regular merge commit for landing a pull request into main?
BeginnerGit6 min
A bug was introduced somewhere in the last 200 commits, but nobody knows exactly which one, and the bug doesn't reproduce reliably enough to eyeball the diffs. How would you find the exact commit using git bisect?
IntermediateGit6 min
A critical bug fix landed on main, and you need to get it onto a release branch that's several weeks behind. Should you cherry-pick the fix, or rebase the release branch onto main?
IntermediateGit6 min
A feature branch has 15 messy commits ('wip', 'fix typo', 'actually fix it') before it's ready for review. How would you use interactive rebase to clean this up into a coherent history?
IntermediateGit6 min
A repository has grown to several gigabytes because it stores large binary assets (design files, ML model weights) directly, making every clone painfully slow. How would you fix this?
IntermediateGit7 min
A teammate resolved a merge conflict by keeping 'their' version of every conflicting hunk without actually reading the other side's changes. Why is that dangerous, and how should conflicts actually be resolved?
IntermediateGit6 min
After migrating to OIDC, how would you detect and alert on someone reintroducing a long-lived AWS access key as a GitHub secret?
IntermediateGitHub ActionsAWS7 min
Two people merged to main within a minute of each other, and now two deployment workflow runs are executing at the same time, racing to deploy. How do you prevent this?
IntermediateGitHub Actions6 min
Your GitHub Actions build spends 3 of its 5 minutes reinstalling the same dependencies every single run. How would you design caching to fix that without risking stale or corrupted cache issues?
IntermediateGitHub Actions6 min
How would you design a GitHub Actions deployment workflow so that deploying to production requires a manual approval, while deploying to staging doesn't?
IntermediateGitHub Actions6 min
You're testing a library against 4 language versions and 3 operating systems using a matrix build. One combination fails immediately, but you want the others to keep running. How do you configure that?
IntermediateGitHub Actions5 min
You want to share common CI logic across 20 repositories. When would you use a reusable workflow versus a composite action?
IntermediateGitHub Actions6 min
A required status check on a GitHub branch protection rule is permanently stuck showing "Expected — Waiting for status to be reported", blocking every PR from merging. What's going on?
IntermediateGitHub7 min
An internal tool making GitHub API calls started getting 403 errors, but checking the rate limit endpoint shows plenty of requests remaining. What else could be causing this?
IntermediateGitHub7 min
Your team needs to build an integration that automatically comments on PRs across the organization's repos. Should you use a GitHub App, an OAuth App, or a personal access token?
IntermediateGitHub7 min
Your org requires branch protection on main everywhere, but a critical tool has just one maintainer who finds required review genuinely slows down urgent fixes. How do you balance this?
IntermediateGitHub6 min
A CODEOWNERS file lists a team as owner of a directory, but PRs touching that directory aren't automatically requesting review from that team. What's likely misconfigured?
IntermediateGitHub6 min
A security review finds a contractor has write access to a sensitive repository, but nobody remembers explicitly granting it. How did this happen, and how do you audit for it going forward?
IntermediateGitHub6 min
Should you publish your container images to GitHub Container Registry (part of GitHub Packages) or a dedicated external registry like ECR or Docker Hub? What actually drives that decision?
IntermediateGitHubDocker6 min