Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Swiggy hiring for DevOps roles
Swiggy is an Indian on-demand delivery platform offering food delivery, Instamart quick commerce and Dineout. Its technology and analytics teams work on delivery time prediction, partner allocation, pricing and customer experience. It hires for software engineers, SDETs, business analysts, data analysts and data scientists. Analysts frequently work closely with operations teams.
For DevOps roles, this Swiggy practice set focuses most on AWS Cloud for DevOps (6), Monitoring, Logging and SRE (6), Linux and Shell Scripting (6), CI/CD Pipelines (4). It has 3 easy, 19 medium, 8 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
E-commerce & consumer tech
Headquarters
Bengaluru, India
Main India offices
Bengaluru, Hyderabad
Swiggy DevOps interview process
Online assessment (coding or SQL)
Technical or case round
Hiring manager round
HR round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
Solved for SwiggyStart practicing
3 QUESTIONS FREESign up to unlock the full question bank and track your progress.Unlock every question and answer, then continue practising company-wise and package-wise.
✓ 3 questions free • Unlock the rest in seconds
01
What is a multi-stage Docker build and why use it?
A multi-stage build uses several FROM instructions in one Dockerfile. Early stages contain compilers and build tools to produce the artefact; the final stage starts from a small runtime image and copies only the built output with COPY --from. The result is a much smaller image with fewer vulnerabilities, because build tools, source code and caches never reach production.
Never store secrets in code or the Jenkinsfile. Use the CI tool's encrypted credentials store, such as Jenkins credentials or GitHub Actions secrets, or fetch them at runtime from HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager. Prefer short-lived credentials, for example OIDC federation from GitHub Actions to AWS instead of long-lived keys. Mask secrets in logs and give each pipeline only the permissions it needs.
03
How do you create an EKS cluster with eksctl and connect kubectl to it?
Open Cost Explorer and group by service, account and tag to find the spike, then drill into usage type. Common causes are forgotten instances, unattached EBS volumes, NAT Gateway data transfer, oversized RDS, or logs retained forever. Fix the source, then set AWS Budgets alerts, enforce tagging, right-size using Compute Optimizer, and use Savings Plans or Spot for steady or batch workloads.
I prepare before my shift by reading recent incidents and making sure runbooks and access work. During an incident I follow the runbook, stay calm and escalate early instead of struggling alone, because quick recovery matters more than solving it myself. Afterwards I note what was confusing and improve the docs or alerts, so each rotation gets easier for everyone.
06
Tell me about a time you automated a repetitive manual task.
Situation: our team manually cleaned old build artefacts on shared servers every week, which took two hours and sometimes deleted the wrong files. Task: I offered to automate it. Action: I wrote a bash script with dry-run mode, logging and a retention rule, tested it on staging and scheduled it with cron. Result: zero manual effort and no more full-disk alerts for six months.
07
Tell me about a blameless post-mortem you were part of.
Situation: a certificate expired and our API was down for 40 minutes. Task: I wrote the post-mortem. Action: I built a timeline from logs and chat, and we focused on why the system allowed it rather than who forgot: renewal was manual and nothing alerted. Result: we automated renewal with cert-manager, added expiry alerts 21 days ahead, and tracked actions to closure.
08
Write a Prometheus alerting rule for a high error rate.
All three move the current branch pointer to another commit. --soft keeps your changes staged, useful for recombining commits. --mixed, the default, keeps changes in the working directory but unstaged. --hard discards changes in both staging and working directory, so uncommitted work is lost. Lost commits can usually still be found with git reflog for a while.
10
An application logs 'Too many open files'. How do you fix it?
The process has hit its file descriptor limit. Check usage with ls /proc/<pid>/fd | wc -l and the limit in /proc/<pid>/limits. Raise it through LimitNOFILE in the systemd unit or /etc/security/limits.conf, then restart. But also look for a leak: sockets or files not closed in code keep growing and will hit any limit. Raising the limit alone only buys time.
11
How do you view the commit history in a compact graph form?
git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
# last 10 commits by one author
git log --oneline -10 --author="Ravi"
# commits touching one file, with diffs
git log -p -- src/app.py
# who changed each line
git blame src/app.py
--graph draws branch and merge lines, and --decorate shows branch and tag names next to commits.
12
A developer accidentally pushed an AWS access key to a public repository. What do you do?
Treat the key as compromised immediately: deactivate and rotate it in IAM, then check CloudTrail for misuse. Removing it from history comes second, using git filter-repo or BFG and a force push, and asking everyone to re-clone. Then prevent repeats with secret scanning in CI, pre-commit hooks like gitleaks and storing secrets in a vault or secrets manager instead of code.
13
Write a bash script that checks whether a service is running and restarts it if not.
#!/bin/bash
set -u
SERVICE="nginx"
if ! systemctl is-active --quiet "$SERVICE"; then
echo "$(date) $SERVICE down, restarting" >> /var/log/svc-check.log
systemctl restart "$SERVICE"
if ! systemctl is-active --quiet "$SERVICE"; then
echo "$SERVICE failed to start" | mail -s "ALERT" ops@example.com
fi
fi
Run it from cron every few minutes; a real setup would rely on systemd Restart= plus monitoring.
14
df shows the disk is 100 percent full but du does not find large files. What is happening?
Usually a large file was deleted while a process still holds it open, so the space is not released. Run lsof +L1 or lsof | grep deleted to find the process and file. Restarting or reloading that process frees the space; if you cannot restart, truncate the file through /proc/<pid>/fd/<n>. The fix is proper log rotation with copytruncate or a reopen signal.
15
How do you run stages in parallel in a Jenkins declarative pipeline?
Averages can hide pain, so check p95 and p99 latency, not mean. Find out which users, regions or features are affected; it may be one endpoint, a third-party API or client-side slowness. Use traces to follow a slow request and check DNS, CDN and front-end metrics through real user monitoring. Then add the missing signal to dashboards so it is visible next time.
A VPC is your private network with a CIDR range like 10.0.0.0/16. It is split into subnets in each Availability Zone. Public subnets have a route to an Internet Gateway; private subnets reach the internet only through a NAT Gateway in a public subnet. Route tables control traffic, security groups and NACLs filter it, and VPC endpoints give private access to services like S3.
18
You pushed a broken commit to the shared main branch and the build is failing. What do you do?
First restore a green main quickly: run git revert <hash> and push, which adds an undo commit without rewriting history that others have pulled. Tell the team in the channel. Then fix the issue on a branch with a proper pull request and tests. Avoid git reset with force push on main; branch protection rules should block it anyway.
19
Explain the Jenkins controller and agent architecture.
The Jenkins controller stores configuration, schedules jobs, serves the UI and keeps build history. Agents are separate machines or containers that actually execute build steps, connected over SSH or JNLP and selected by labels. Running builds on agents rather than the controller keeps the controller stable and secure, and lets you scale with dynamic agents on Kubernetes or cloud VMs that are created per build.
systemctl status nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx
sudo systemctl restart nginx
sudo systemctl enable nginx # start at boot
sudo systemctl disable nginx
journalctl -u nginx -f # follow service logs
sudo systemctl daemon-reload # after editing a unit file
Unit files live in /etc/systemd/system. enable creates the symlink for the boot target, while start only runs it now.
The control plane has the kube-apiserver, the front door for all requests; etcd, the key-value store holding cluster state; the scheduler, which places pods on nodes; and the controller manager, which runs reconciliation loops. Each worker node runs the kubelet, which starts and monitors pods; kube-proxy, which handles service networking; and a container runtime such as containerd.
22
You suddenly cannot SSH into a Linux server. What do you check?
Check reachability with ping and whether port 22 is open with nc -zv host 22. Then look at security groups, firewall rules and whether the sshd service is running, using the cloud console or serial access. Run ssh -vvv to see whether it fails at key exchange or authentication. Common causes are wrong key permissions, a full disk, a changed IP, or fail2ban blocking you.
23
Your service has used its entire error budget halfway through the quarter. What happens next?
Following the agreed error budget policy, the team pauses risky feature launches and focuses on reliability work: fixing the top causes of failures from post-mortems, adding tests, improving rollbacks and canaries. Product and engineering leads review the plan together. Once the budget recovers in the rolling window, normal releases resume. If the SLO is unrealistic, revisit it with data.
24
How do you assume an IAM role in another account using the AWS CLI?
# ~/.aws/config
[profile prod-admin]
role_arn = arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/DevOpsAdmin
source_profile = default
region = ap-south-1
aws s3 ls --profile prod-admin
# manual way
aws sts assume-role \
--role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/DevOpsAdmin \
--role-session-name ravi-session
The role's trust policy must allow your account. Temporary credentials expire, usually after an hour.
Situation: our dev and test AWS accounts cost almost as much as production. Task: my manager asked me to cut waste without slowing teams. Action: I tagged resources by owner, found idle instances and old snapshots, scheduled non-production instances to stop at night with a Lambda, and moved CI agents to Spot. Result: non-production spend fell about 40 percent within two months.
26
How do you configure an S3 remote backend with locking?
terraform {
backend "s3" {
bucket = "acme-terraform-state"
key = "prod/network/terraform.tfstate"
region = "ap-south-1"
encrypt = true
use_lockfile = true
}
}
Then run terraform init (add -migrate-state if moving local state). Enable versioning on the bucket. Older setups use dynamodb_table = "tf-locks" instead of use_lockfile for locking.
27
An e-commerce site expects 10 times normal traffic during a festive sale. How do you prepare?
Load test beforehand to find bottlenecks. Pre-scale Auto Scaling groups or Kubernetes nodes with scheduled scaling, since reactive scaling may be too slow. Cache aggressively with CloudFront and Redis, add read replicas, and check service quotas. Use queues to absorb spikes in order processing, set up dashboards and alerts, freeze risky deployments, and keep an on-call war room ready.
Idempotency means running the same playbook many times gives the same result without unwanted changes. Modules check current state first: the apt module installs a package only if missing and reports ok instead of changed. The shell and command modules are not idempotent by default, so use creates, removes or changed_when conditions, or prefer a dedicated module.
29
Write PromQL queries for request rate, error rate and p95 latency.
# requests per second per service over 5 minutes
sum by (service) (rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
# error ratio (5xx)
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
/ sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
# p95 latency from a histogram
histogram_quantile(0.95,
sum by (le) (rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])))
rate() works on counters and handles resets; the le label holds histogram bucket bounds.
30
How do you use stored credentials inside a Jenkins pipeline?
pipeline {
agent any
environment {
SONAR_TOKEN = credentials('sonar-token')
}
stages {
stage('Push') {
steps {
withCredentials([usernamePassword(credentialsId: 'docker-hub',
usernameVariable: 'USER', passwordVariable: 'PASS')]) {
sh 'echo $PASS | docker login -u $USER --password-stdin'
}
}
}
}
}
Jenkins masks these values in console output. Use single quotes in sh so Groovy does not interpolate the secret.
Tips to crack the Swiggy DevOps interview
Prepare cases on order delivery time, delivery partner utilisation or Instamart stock-outs, which match Swiggy's core problems.
Practise SQL on order-level data, including retention, repeat rate and funnel conversion calculations.
Use the Swiggy app critically and be ready to suggest improvements with metrics to track their impact.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; Swiggy interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Swiggy DevOps interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (coding or SQL); Technical or case round; Hiring manager round; HR round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the Swiggy DevOps interview?
This practice set leans on AWS Cloud for DevOps (6), Monitoring, Logging and SRE (6), Linux and Shell Scripting (6), CI/CD Pipelines (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Swiggy interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Swiggy?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in e-commerce & consumer tech interviews like Swiggy's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Swiggy hire DevOps professionals in India?
Swiggy has large teams in Bengaluru, Hyderabad. Openings and locations change often, so check the Swiggy careers page and filter by city and experience.