First DevOps Hire
You are the first infrastructure hire at a nine-person startup where everything is manual. Decide what to fix first, survive a Friday outage, and defend your choices.
the situation
You have just joined a nine-person startup as its first DevOps hire. The product runs on a single cloud VM that the CTO set up two years ago. Deploys happen by SSHing in and running git pull, usually by whoever wrote the code. There is no staging environment, no CI, and no monitoring beyond a free uptime pinger. Database changes are applied by hand in a production shell. Secrets live in a shared document that everyone on the team can read. The founders are friendly but busy, and they hired you because "things keep breaking and we do not know why."
what this interview covers
- Orientation in an unfamiliar system
- Deciding what to fix first
- A Friday outage, live
- Scale and trade-off pushback
- Retrospective and ownership
How the interview works
One scenario, 45 minutes, hard stop. The interviewer works through the situation with you - design, incident, trade-offs - and will not confirm or correct anything until the debrief. There are more questions in the arc than most people reach; how far you get matters less than how well you reason. Saying you do not know and moving on beats bluffing. When time runs out, you are graded on everything you covered.
about this interview
About
You walk in as the first infrastructure hire at a nine-person startup: one hand-built VM, SSH deploys, database changes typed into a production shell, secrets in a shared doc, and founders who only know that things keep breaking. The interview follows that job from your first week through your six-month review - what you inspect, what you fix first, how you handle the outage that lands on a Friday afternoon, and how you defend your choices when the founders push back.
The interviewer plays a senior engineer running a real screen. They will ask, probe, and push on weak spots, and pushing is not a signal that you are wrong. What they will not do is confirm, correct, or coach you mid-interview - no nods, no hints, no "good answer." If you do not know something, say so and move on; that reads far better than bluffing.
The clock is real: 45 minutes, hard stop, wherever you are. When it ends (or when you end it), you get the debrief real interviews never give you - a hire-signal verdict, per-question notes on what landed and what you missed, and the answer a strong candidate would have given.