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DevOps Managerial Round Questions & Answers

35 questions for the managerial round stage — 19 medium, 16 hard.

About the managerial round round

The managerial round is usually with a hiring manager or team lead. It mixes real-work scenarios, prioritisation and stakeholder questions with behavioural questions about ownership, conflict and learning.

Tips for the managerial round round

  • Use the STAR format for every story: Situation, Task, Action, Result.
  • Show trade-offs: what you chose, what you gave up and why.
  • Be honest about mistakes and focus on what you changed afterwards.
  • Ask the manager about team goals and how success is measured in the role.
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01

A pod is in CrashLoopBackOff. How do you troubleshoot it?

KubernetesMedium
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The container starts and keeps crashing, and Kubernetes waits longer between restarts. Run kubectl describe pod to see events and exit codes, and kubectl logs <pod> --previous for the crashed container's output. Common causes are missing environment variables or secrets, bad config, failing database connections, a wrong command, an aggressive liveness probe, or exit code 137 meaning OOM kill.
02

When would you choose ECS, EKS or Lambda?

AWS Cloud for DevOpsMedium
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Lambda runs functions without servers, billed per request and duration, ideal for event-driven tasks with short runtimes up to 15 minutes. ECS is AWS's simpler container orchestrator, good when you want containers without Kubernetes complexity, often with Fargate. EKS is managed Kubernetes, chosen for portability, a rich ecosystem and existing Kubernetes skills, but it needs more operational knowledge.
03

What are Ansible handlers and how do you use them?

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible)Medium
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Handlers are tasks that run only when notified by another task that reported a change, and they run once at the end of the play even if notified many times. tasks: - name: Update app config ansible.builtin.copy: src: app.conf dest: /etc/app/app.conf notify: Restart app handlers: - name: Restart app ansible.builtin.service: name: app state: restarted This avoids restarting services when nothing changed.
04

How do you work with developers who resist new DevOps processes?

AWS Cloud for DevOpsHard
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Situation: a team saw our new pipeline checks as slowing them down. Task: get adoption without forcing it. Action: I sat with them to understand the pain, found that the scans added twelve minutes, moved slow scans to run in parallel and made results clearer. Result: pipeline time went below the old one, the team adopted it and later suggested further improvements.
05

Tell me about a time you migrated an application to Kubernetes.

KubernetesHard
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Situation: our monolith and five services ran on hand-managed VMs with frequent config drift. Task: I led the move to a managed Kubernetes cluster. Action: I containerised each service, wrote Helm charts, added probes and resource limits, set up Argo CD, and migrated one low-risk service first with a rollback plan. Result: deployments went from weekly to daily and VM costs dropped about 30 percent.
06

How do you prioritise when several teams ask you for infrastructure work at the same time?

AWS Cloud for DevOpsMedium
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I list the requests with their business impact and deadline, and check which are blocking production or a release. Production issues and security fixes come first. For the rest I agree priority with my lead and the requesting teams openly, give realistic timelines and share progress. Where requests repeat, I build self-service templates so teams are not waiting on me.
07

Your container takes 10 seconds to stop and does not shut down gracefully. Why?

Docker and ContainersHard
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docker stop sends SIGTERM to PID 1 and waits 10 seconds before SIGKILL. If the Dockerfile uses shell form like CMD node app.js, PID 1 is a shell that does not forward signals, so the app never gets SIGTERM. Use exec form CMD ["node", "app.js"], use exec in entrypoint scripts, or add an init such as tini with --init, and handle SIGTERM in code.
08

You need one pipeline that deploys to dev, staging and production with approval before production. How do you design it?

CI/CD PipelinesMedium
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Build and test once, publish a versioned artefact, then promote it through environments. Dev deploys automatically on merge, staging deploys after dev smoke tests, and production waits for a manual approval from authorised people using a Jenkins input step or GitHub environment protection rules. Keep environment-specific settings in config files or parameters, not separate pipelines, and record who approved each release.
09

A production deployment failed halfway. What do you do?

CI/CD PipelinesMedium
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Assess impact quickly using monitoring and error rates. If users are affected, roll back to the last good version, which should be a single pipeline action redeploying the previous artefact. Communicate status to stakeholders. Then check pipeline logs and application logs to find the cause, fix it in a branch and redeploy. Afterwards, hold a blameless review and add a check to catch it earlier.
10

An e-commerce site expects 10 times normal traffic during a festive sale. How do you prepare?

AWS Cloud for DevOpsHard
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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.
11

How do you create an EKS cluster with eksctl and connect kubectl to it?

AWS Cloud for DevOpsMedium
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eksctl create cluster \ --name shop-dev \ --region ap-south-1 \ --nodegroup-name workers \ --node-type t3.medium \ --nodes 2 --nodes-min 2 --nodes-max 5 \ --managed aws eks update-kubeconfig --name shop-dev --region ap-south-1 kubectl get nodes eksctl builds CloudFormation stacks for the VPC, control plane and node group. In production, teams usually manage EKS with Terraform modules instead.
12

How do you assume an IAM role in another account using the AWS CLI?

AWS Cloud for DevOpsMedium
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# ~/.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.
13

Logging costs are rising fast because of huge log volume. What do you do?

Monitoring, Logging and SREHard
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Find the top log sources by volume. Lower verbose debug logging in production, drop health check and noisy access logs, and sample high-volume info logs. Use structured logs to avoid duplicated fields. Set retention tiers: a few days hot, then archive to S3. Turn repeated log lines into metrics where only counts matter, which is far cheaper to store and query.
14

A pod is stuck in Pending state. What could be the reasons?

KubernetesMedium
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Pending means it has not been scheduled or its volumes are not ready. kubectl describe pod shows the scheduler's reason. Common causes are insufficient CPU or memory on nodes for the requests, node selectors, affinity or taints that no node satisfies, a PersistentVolumeClaim that cannot bind, or a resource quota being exceeded. Fix the spec or add nodes with the cluster autoscaler.
15

An application logs 'Too many open files'. How do you fix it?

Linux and Shell ScriptingHard
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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.
16

The on-call team gets dozens of alerts every night and is burning out. How do you fix it?

Monitoring, Logging and SREMedium
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Collect alert data for a few weeks: which fired, how often, and whether anyone acted. Delete or downgrade non-actionable alerts, tune thresholds and add for durations, and group duplicates in Alertmanager. Fix the recurring root causes behind the top alerts and automate common fixes. Move to SLO-based alerts and make sure rotations are fair with follow-up time after bad nights.
17

Tell me about a time you automated a repetitive manual task.

Linux and Shell ScriptingMedium
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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.
18

What is remote state and state locking in Terraform?

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible)Medium
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Remote state stores the state file in a shared backend such as an S3 bucket, Azure Storage or Terraform Cloud, so the whole team and CI use the same state. Locking prevents two runs from changing state at the same time, avoiding corruption; on S3 it uses a lock file or a DynamoDB table. Enable versioning and encryption on the backend for recovery and security.
19

Two engineers ran terraform apply at the same time. What could go wrong and how do you prevent it?

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible)Hard
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Without locking, both runs read the same state and write conflicting updates, which can corrupt state or create duplicate resources. Use a remote backend with state locking so the second run waits or fails. Better still, run apply only from a CI pipeline on merge to main, so changes are serialised and reviewed. If a lock is stuck after a crash, use terraform force-unlock carefully.
20

A developer accidentally pushed an AWS access key to a public repository. What do you do?

Git and Version ControlHard
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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.
21

You need to bring existing manually created cloud resources under Terraform. How?

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible)Medium
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Write the resource blocks in code, then import the real resources into state. Since Terraform 1.5 you can declare import blocks with the resource ID and run plan; terraform plan -generate-config-out can even draft the configuration. Older versions use the terraform import CLI command. Run plan until it shows no changes, which proves code matches reality.
22

df shows the disk is 100 percent full but du does not find large files. What is happening?

Linux and Shell ScriptingHard
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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.
23

Write a script that alerts when any disk partition is above 80 percent used.

Linux and Shell ScriptingMedium
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#!/bin/bash THRESHOLD=80 df -hP | awk 'NR>1 {gsub("%","",$5); print $5, $6}' | while read -r used mount; do if [ "$used" -ge "$THRESHOLD" ]; then echo "WARNING: $mount is ${used}% full on $(hostname)" fi done df -P keeps each entry on one line, awk strips the percent sign, and the loop compares each value with the threshold.
24

Someone deleted a resource manually that Terraform manages, and the state is now out of sync. What do you do?

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible)Hard
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Run terraform plan; Terraform refreshes and sees the resource is missing, so it plans to recreate it, which is often right. If the resource should no longer exist, remove it from code, or use terraform state rm. If state itself is corrupted, restore a previous version from the versioned S3 bucket. Then find out why manual changes happened and tighten access.
25

During rolling updates some user requests fail. How do you get true zero-downtime deployments?

KubernetesHard
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Add a proper readiness probe so new pods get traffic only when ready. Set maxUnavailable to 0 and maxSurge to 1 or more. Handle SIGTERM gracefully and add a short preStop sleep so endpoints update before the old pod stops accepting connections, with terminationGracePeriodSeconds long enough to drain requests. Add a PodDisruptionBudget for node maintenance too.
26

An EC2 instance in a private subnet cannot download packages from the internet. Why?

AWS Cloud for DevOpsMedium
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A private subnet has no direct route to the Internet Gateway. Check that its route table sends 0.0.0.0/0 to a NAT Gateway placed in a public subnet, that the NAT Gateway has an Elastic IP, and that the security group and NACL allow outbound traffic and return ports. For AWS services like S3, a VPC endpoint avoids NAT data charges.
27

Pods are running but the service is not reachable. How do you debug it?

KubernetesMedium
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Run kubectl get endpoints <svc>; if empty, the service selector does not match the pod labels or pods are not ready. Check that the service targetPort matches the container port. Test from a debug pod with curl svc-name.namespace:port to separate DNS from app issues. Then check network policies blocking traffic and, for external access, the ingress rules and load balancer health checks.
28

Builds fail randomly because of flaky tests. How do you handle it?

CI/CD PipelinesMedium
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First identify flaky tests by tracking which tests fail and pass on the same commit. Quarantine them into a separate non-blocking job so the main pipeline stays trustworthy, and raise tickets with owners. Common causes are timing assumptions, shared test data, order dependence and external services. Blind automatic retries hide real bugs, so use them only briefly while fixing the root cause.
29

How would you convince a team that manages servers by hand to adopt Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible)Hard
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I would start with their pain, such as slow environment setup or outages from manual changes, rather than the tool. Then I would codify one small, visible piece, for example a new staging environment, and show it rebuilt in minutes with a reviewed pull request. I would pair with team members, write simple docs and expand gradually, measuring time saved and incidents avoided.
30

The kernel OOM killer keeps killing your application. How do you handle it?

Linux and Shell ScriptingHard
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Confirm with dmesg or journalctl -k, which shows the OOM message and the killed process. Check whether memory grows over time (a leak) or spikes with load. Set correct heap limits, for example JVM -Xmx below container memory, add swap only as a buffer, and set memory limits so one service cannot starve others. Then profile the app and right-size the instance.
31

An application on EC2 needs to read files from S3. How do you give it access securely?

AWS Cloud for DevOpsMedium
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Create an IAM role with a policy allowing only the needed actions, such as s3:GetObject on that bucket, attach it to the instance through an instance profile, and let the AWS SDK pick up temporary credentials automatically. Never put access keys in code or config files. Optionally add a bucket policy and a VPC endpoint so traffic stays inside AWS.
32

How do you use stored credentials inside a Jenkins pipeline?

CI/CD PipelinesMedium
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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.
33

Tell me about a time you improved the reliability of a system.

Monitoring, Logging and SREHard
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Situation: our order service had repeated weekend outages from database connection exhaustion. Task: as the senior engineer I owned the fix. Action: I defined an availability SLO, added connection pool metrics and alerts, introduced a connection proxy, and added load tests to the pipeline. Result: monthly availability went from about 99.5 to 99.95 percent and pages dropped by more than half.
34

Tell me about a production deployment that went wrong and how you handled it.

CI/CD PipelinesHard
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Situation: a release passed staging but caused payment timeouts in production because a new connection pool setting was wrong. Task: as release owner, I had to restore service. Action: I triggered the rollback job within ten minutes, updated stakeholders, then found the config difference between environments. Result: service recovered quickly and we added config validation and a canary stage to the pipeline.
35

Your service has used its entire error budget halfway through the quarter. What happens next?

Monitoring, Logging and SREHard
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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.

Frequently asked questions

What happens in the DevOps managerial round round?

The managerial round is usually with a hiring manager or team lead. It mixes real-work scenarios, prioritisation and stakeholder questions with behavioural questions about ownership, conflict and learning.

How do I clear the managerial round round?

Use the STAR format for every story: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Show trade-offs: what you chose, what you gave up and why. Be honest about mistakes and focus on what you changed afterwards.

Which round comes next?

A typical order is online assessment, telephonic screening, one or two technical rounds, a managerial round and HR. Use the other round pages to practise each stage.

Practise every interview round

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More ways to practise

Company-wise DevOps questionsExperience-wise DevOps questionsRole-wise DevOps questionsCity-wise DevOps questionsMost asked DevOps questionsScenario-based questionsPractical / hands-on questionsHR & behavioural questionsDevOps mock interviewOnline assessment questionsTechnical round questionsManagerial round questionsDevOps topic sheets