Key Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Next DevOps Engineer

At this point, it’s well understood that the rigid IT silos of yesteryear are struggling to keep up with the pace at which modern demand creates and destroys opportunities. Stratified teams that have preset communication and operation protocols are not nimble enough to respond to the number of change requests generated, but often work in misaligned “bubbles” where they have no idea what their peers in other departments are doing.

DevOps (Development + Operations) aimed at solving such issues by borrowing from Agile and Lean methodologies, both of which use efficient resource management, faster feedback-correction loops, and quicker time to market via modern cloud based tools.

And, it’s working! A Gartner survey in 2021 showed that not only 83% IT executives implemented DevOps in their organization for better performance, but 68% of those who did reported positive customer experience as well.

Why Hiring a Remote DevOps Engineer is So Hard

Since each company has its own way of implementing DevOps, there are no set of interview questions or tests that can be universally employed. Furthermore, since there are no colleges or schools that offer courses in DevOps, each developer has to train him/herself in it, in which case they may have their own interpretation of what works and what doesn't.

Besides good coding knowledge, a DevOps team member needs to have many hard and soft skills to ensure they can be a part of fast-changing teams. However, since DevOps does have a core principle that all teams follow, you can use the ideas below to create your own questionnaire.

The Three Core Principles of DevOps

Since the primary focus of DevOps is to combine development and operations, all DevOps teams share a set of core principles around which they can design a team. Your interview strategy should aim to ensure that your candidates have sufficient skills in each of these, besides coding or project management.

Continuous Improvement Continuous Development CI/CD

CI/CD builds lie at the core of DevOps.Some questions to consider when interviewing your next DevOps candidate:

1. Explain the advantages of CI/CD. Give examples from projects you’ve worked on.
2. Do you have experience working with traditional infrastructure, microservices, or both?
3. Which tools do you prefer for implementing CI/CD protocols? Why did you go with them?
4. In your last project, how did you organize your scripts to work with the assigned CI/CD platform?
5. What is the difference between centralized and distributed Version Control System (VCS)?
6. What in your view is the success factor for Continuous Integration?
7. Have you worked with Jenkins? If yes, explain how to create a Jenkins job and move it from one server to another.
8. What has been your average MTTR on build failures, if at all?

Automation

Automating a build is the holy grail of any CI/CD initiative. However, it’s easier said than done.

1. Which automation scripts, plugins and tools are you used to using for automating your CI/CD pipelines?
2. How do you build and spin up a server for automation?
3. Can you show us how you configure a server?
4. How do you manage variations in build systems and build processes?
5. How do you find out who made the edits that led to a build breaking?
6. Let’s say we have to continuously deploy a build to two clients, one running on Linux and the other on Windows. How will you automatically deploy the build to both?

Collaboration

DevOps is made possible only because of its ability to rapidly put together and deploy disparate teams successfully. As such, the ability to collaborate is of paramount importance here.

1. Oftentimes development and operations teams use different toolkits which causes friction between them. Have you faced such issues? If so, how did you address them?
2. Adopting new tools is a necessity for the sake of greater efficiency. How will you convince your team members to move away from tools they are used to if it came to that?
3. Have you ever had to hire a remote DevOps Engineer or Consultant? Explain how you selected them.
4. Which DevOps project management tools in your opinion are the best?

We Can Help You Hire Remote DevOps Consultants in Record Time

We at Muoro ask these questions among many others to drill to the bottom of a candidate's knowledge and potential. Our Engineer-as-a-Service model ensures you only get the best talent working on your project.

Each candidate is screened thoroughly for not only how updated their skills are, but whether they are team players or not. We also offer a Three-Week Free Trial with all our service features so you can start your project with complete peace of mind. Give us a shout-out if you’d like to learn more.