Staff / Principal Interview Questions
228 questions across 34 categories
Expert-level and system-design questions — the scope, trade-offs, and organizational reasoning expected at the most senior technical levels.
How would you structure a shared Terraform module differently if its consuming repos were owned by teams with different release cadences and risk tolerances?
AdvancedTerraform7 min
How would you handle a breaking change to a shared Terraform module that genuinely needs to reach all consumers within a specific timeframe, like a security fix?
AdvancedTerraform7 min
terraform plan shows changes to a resource you didn't touch, and the diff traces back to a data source — what's actually happening?
AdvancedTerraform7 min
Converting a resource block from count to for_each caused Terraform to want to destroy and recreate every instance — why, and how do you migrate safely?
AdvancedTerraform7 min
A corrupted or accidentally-overwritten Terraform state file threatens to make you lose track of an entire environment's real infrastructure — how would you design for recoverability?
AdvancedTerraform7 min
How would you design a CI/CD pipeline to automatically block a Terraform apply that would destroy a production database?
AdvancedTerraform8 min
How does Terraform's create_before_destroy interact with resources that have unique naming constraints, like a fixed identifier?
AdvancedTerraform7 min
A single Terraform state file managing an entire environment's infrastructure takes 10 minutes to plan and any change risks touching everything — how would you split it?
AdvancedTerraform8 min
Using terraform_remote_state to reference another team's outputs works, but creates a tight coupling that breaks when they change their state — what's the alternative?
AdvancedTerraform7 min
A database password is passed as a resource argument in Terraform — does marking the variable sensitive actually protect it in the state file?
AdvancedTerraform7 min
terraform plan shows a production RDS instance will be destroyed and recreated after a change you thought was trivial. What would you investigate before running apply?
AdvancedTerraformAWS10 min