These questions are based on real interview experiences from candidates who interviewed at this company. You can practice answering them interactively on Dataford to better prepare for your interview.

Focus your preparation on core DevOps fundamentals, production-grade problem-solving, and the ability to communicate trade-offs clearly. Expect interviews to probe your depth on the tools you claim, your approach to reliability and automation, and how you collaborate to deliver outcomes. Prepare concise stories that show ownership, measurable impact, and learning from incidents.

• Role-related Knowledge (Technical/Domain Skills) - Interviewers will test your fluency with cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP), Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, Linux, networking, and observability. They look for conceptual understanding plus practical, production-grade experience. Demonstrate with specific systems you built, pipelines you hardened, and issues you resolved.
• Problem-Solving Ability - Expect scenario-driven questions on diagnosing outages, scaling systems, and reducing toil. Interviewers evaluate how you frame a problem, identify constraints, compare options, and justify decisions with data and risk trade-offs. Walk through your reasoning step-by-step and close with measurable results.
• Leadership - Whether or not you manage people, you will influence roadmaps, set standards, and drive adoption. Interviewers look for how you align stakeholders, write clear proposals, lead incident response, and uplift the engineering bar. Show how you created shared understanding and sustained improvements.
• Culture Fit (Collaboration & Ambiguity) - Adobe values customer focus, craftsmanship, and respect. Interviewers expect you to handle ambiguity, communicate crisply, and collaborate across teams. Demonstrate humility, curiosity, and a bias for action—especially when the path forward is not obvious.

Adobe’s DevOps interviews are structured to evaluate depth over buzzwords and practical competence over puzzle-solving. You’ll typically move through a blend of technical deep dives, design/problem-solving sessions, and conversations focused on collaboration and leadership. The tone is professional and inquisitive—interviewers aim to understand how you think, not to trick you.

Pace can vary by team and location. Some processes include a practical coding or automation exercise; others emphasize detailed technical conversations and system design. Expect multiple perspectives across rounds; each interviewer assesses a distinct dimension and contributes to a holistic hiring decision.

This visual outlines the typical sequence—from recruiter screen to technical and managerial conversations—and may include a hands-on assessment. Use it to plan your preparation cadence, block focus time for deeper rounds, and clarify logistics early (e.g., code environment, whiteboard vs. collaborative editor).

Cloud Infrastructure & Networking

You’ll be assessed on how you design, secure, and operate cloud-native services at scale. Expect questions spanning VPC design, subnetting, routing, load balancing, security groups, identity, and cost controls across AWS/Azure/GCP.

Be ready to go over:

• VPC/VNet architecture: CIDR planning, private vs. public subnets, NAT/bastion patterns
• Networking fundamentals: DNS, TLS, HTTP/2, gRPC, L4/L7 load balancing, ingress/egress
• Cloud services: IAM policies/roles, KMS, service accounts, managed databases, queues
• Advanced concepts (less common): Multi-region active-active, service mesh ingress, private link, hybrid connectivity

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a secure, multi-AZ architecture for a stateless microservice with external dependencies."
• "How would you diagnose intermittent 502s behind an ingress gateway?"
• "Walk me through least-privilege access for cross-account deployments."

CI/CD, Containers & Infrastructure as Code

Interviewers will probe your ability to build fast, reliable pipelines and immutable, reproducible infrastructure. They care about standards, testability, rollback strategies, and developer experience.

Be ready to go over:

• CI/CD tooling: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Argo CD, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary)
• Containers & orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes primitives, Helm/Kustomize, autoscaling, resource tuning
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform modules, state management, drift detection, policy-as-code (OPA)
• Advanced concepts (less common): Progressive delivery, supply-chain security (SBOM, signing), multi-cluster GitOps

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a pipeline that promotes artifacts across environments with automated gates."
• "Explain how you’d implement canary releases on Kubernetes with safe rollbacks."
• "Show how you’d structure Terraform for multi-region reuse and guardrails."

Reliability, Observability & Incident Response

Expect detailed discussions about SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, tracing, alerting, and how you reduce operational burden. You’ll be evaluated on production judgment, prioritization, and learning loops after incidents.

Be ready to go over:

• SLIs/SLOs/error budgets: Choosing meaningful signals, tuning alerts, on-call hygiene
• Telemetry stack: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, tracing in microservices
• Incident management: Runbooks, escalation, postmortems, chaos testing, game days
• Advanced concepts (less common): Capacity modeling, load shedding, circuit breakers, backpressure

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Define SLIs/SLOs for an API and map alerting to customer impact."
• "You’ve got a latency spike after a new release—walk your diagnostic steps."
• "How do you turn a recurring 3 a.m. page into a lasting reliability fix?"

Security, Compliance & Governance

Security is embedded in engineering at Adobe. Interviewers will test how you integrate security controls into build and run phases without slowing delivery.

Be ready to go over:

• Identity & access: IAM, RBAC, SSO/OIDC, secrets management, key rotation
• Secure SDLC: SAST/DAST, dependency scanning, image hardening, vulnerability management
• Compliance: Audit trails, change approvals, data protection patterns, least privilege
• Advanced concepts (less common): Zero trust networking, workload identity, runtime security, policy-as-code

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a secret management strategy for multi-tenant Kubernetes."
• "How would you enforce image signing and provenance in CI/CD?"
• "Describe how you’d prepare for a compliance audit across multiple environments."

Scripting, Automation & Practical Coding

You will likely write code—shell, Python, or a language of your choice—to automate tasks, integrate APIs, or manipulate infrastructure. The bar is clean, maintainable, and idempotent automation that others can run.

Be ready to go over:

• Languages: Bash, Python, or a comfortable language for you; code quality and testing
• Automation: Idempotent scripts, retries/backoff, pagination, error handling, logging
• APIs/SDKs: Cloud provider SDKs, GitHub/GitLab APIs, Kubernetes client libraries
• Advanced concepts (less common): Event-driven automation, operators/controllers, policy enforcement hooks

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Implement a script to rotate credentials and update dependent services safely."
• "Parse logs to surface top error patterns and emit metrics."
• "Trigger a canary rollout via API and verify health checks before promotion."