What is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps Engineer at Poshmark is a reliability-focused builder. You will design, automate, and operate the platforms that power our social commerce marketplace—enabling creators, sellers, and buyers to interact in real time across mobile and web. Your work ensures deployments are safe and fast, environments are reproducible, and the platform is resilient under unpredictable, user-driven traffic.

This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure, tooling, and product velocity. You will partner with backend, data, and mobile teams to standardize CI/CD, modernize infrastructure (e.g., containers, infrastructure-as-code), and harden observability so we can diagnose issues before users feel them. From live shopping events to peak seasonal surges, your impact is measured in uptime, deployment frequency, and the confidence engineers feel when shipping.

It is a highly visible, high-trust position. Expect to influence technical direction (e.g., Kubernetes adoption patterns, release strategies, cost controls) and to drive incident response discipline. If you enjoy making complex systems reliable, automating everything, and helping teams ship faster with less risk, this role will challenge and energize you.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Prepare to demonstrate depth in modern DevOps tooling and practices while showing how you think under constraints. You’ll be expected to connect technologies to outcomes: faster delivery, safer releases, better observability, and lower operational toil. Interviewers value candidates who can explain trade-offs clearly and who have hands-on stories of moving the needle in production.

• Role-related Knowledge (Technical/Domain Skills) - Interviewers assess your practical fluency with cloud platforms, Linux, networking, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC (e.g., Terraform), observability, and security. Show you can translate concepts into action by discussing specific pipelines, runbooks, incident retros, and infrastructure decisions you implemented.
• Problem-Solving Ability (How you approach challenges) - You’ll be evaluated on how you reason about failures, scale, and ambiguity. Walk through how you diagnose issues, validate hypotheses, weigh trade-offs, and implement iterative fixes that stick.
• Leadership (Influence without authority) - Expect to describe how you rallied cross-functional teams, standardized practices, and drove adoption of tooling. Strong candidates showcase measurable improvements (e.g., deployment time cut by 60%, MTTR reduced by 40%).
• Culture Fit (Collaboration and ownership) - Poshmark values humility, accountability, and a bias for action. Demonstrate how you partner with developers, communicate risk, write clear docs, and keep users front and center during decisions.

Interview Process Overview

Your interview experience will balance technical rigor with practical, scenario-based conversations. You will meet a mix of engineers and leaders who probe real-world problem solving rather than theoretical minutiae. Expect interviews that move from breadth (tooling and platform understanding) to depth (design trade-offs, incident response, and DevOps leadership).

The pacing is focused but respectful. Candidates report friendly, knowledgeable interviewers who dig into specifics of your experience and decision-making. Poshmark often includes cross-functional perspectives—occasionally with senior leaders—reflecting the impact this role has on the broader business and engineering culture.

You will likely experience a structured path that progresses from initial screens into technical deep dives and collaborative design sessions. The process emphasizes clarity, ownership, and your ability to elevate platform reliability while enabling rapid product iteration.

This visual timeline outlines the typical stages from screening to decision, clarifying when to expect technical exercises, design-focused conversations, and leadership discussions. Use it to plan your preparation focus and to pace your energy across rounds. Build a concise portfolio of stories—deployments, incidents, migrations—to reuse efficiently at each stage.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Cloud Infrastructure & Networking Fundamentals

This area validates your command of cloud primitives, Linux networking, and how you design for reliability and cost. Interviewers will probe how you’ve modeled VPCs/subnets, secured endpoints, and used managed services to reduce operational overhead.

• Compute, networking, and storage: EC2/VMs, autoscaling, VPCs, subnets, routing, NAT, security groups, block vs. object storage

• Resilience & scalability: Multi-AZ design, health checks, auto-recovery, rate limiting, caching layers, chaos testing

• Cost-awareness: Right-sizing, spot vs. on-demand, storage tiers, eliminating idle resources

• Advanced concepts (less common): PrivateLink, service mesh ingress/egress patterns, eBPF-based troubleshooting

• Example questions or scenarios:

  • "Design a highly available, cost-conscious architecture for a user-facing API that sees unpredictable spikes."
  • "Walk us through debugging intermittent 502s across services inside a VPC. Where do you start? What telemetry do you expect?"
  • "How have you reduced cloud spend without sacrificing performance?"

Containers, Kubernetes, and Platform Engineering

Expect to go deep on containerization and orchestration. Interviewers care about how you package apps, manage deployments, and build a paved path for teams.

• Container fundamentals: Dockerfiles, image slimming, base image strategy, SBOMs

• Kubernetes operations: Ingress, service types, HPA, probes, resource quotas, multi-tenant cluster design

• Release strategies: Blue/green vs. canary vs. progressive delivery; rollback mechanisms

• Advanced concepts (less common): Operators, multi-cluster topologies, eBPF observability in clusters, policy engines (OPA/Gatekeeper)

• Example questions or scenarios:

  • "Given a failing rolling update that stalls at 50%, how do you diagnose and recover?"
  • "Design a cluster strategy for multiple product teams with different SLAs and traffic profiles."
  • "What guardrails would you enforce via admission policies?"

CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and Automation

This area confirms you can build reliable pipelines and reproducible infrastructure that reduce human error and cycle time.

• Pipeline design: Build/test/stage/prod, artifact management, parallelization, secrets management

• IaC & GitOps: Terraform modules, state management, code review practices, drift detection, environments

• Quality gates: Policy-as-code, security scans, integration tests, deployment SLOs

• Advanced concepts (less common): Ephemeral environments, monorepo strategies, self-service delivery portals

• Example questions or scenarios:

  • "Describe a CI/CD pipeline you designed end-to-end. What failures did you anticipate and how?"
  • "Terraform state file is locked/corrupted—how do you recover safely?"
  • "How would you implement canary with automatic rollback on error budgets?"

Observability, SRE Practices, and Incident Response

You will be assessed on how you detect, triage, and prevent issues. Strong candidates anchor answers with metrics, logs, traces, and clear SLO thinking.

• Signals & tooling: Metrics, logs, traces, distributed tracing, log sampling, alert routing

• Reliability governance: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, on-call hygiene, runbooks, blameless postmortems

• Performance & capacity: Load testing, caching, hot paths, backpressure, circuit breakers

• Advanced concepts (less common): MELT correlation, adaptive alerting, synthetic monitoring for user journeys

• Example questions or scenarios:

  • "An API p95 latency doubles during peak traffic. How do you isolate root cause?"
  • "Show us a sample runbook and how it evolved after incidents."
  • "How do you structure SLOs for a marketplace checkout flow?"

Security, Compliance, and Governance in DevOps

Security is woven into every decision. Expect practical, preventative thinking over theoretical answers.

• Secrets & identity: Vault/KMS, short-lived credentials, workload identity

• Supply chain security: Image signing, SBOMs, provenance, dependency scanning

• Network & data protection: TLS, mTLS, least privilege, encryption at rest/in transit

• Advanced concepts (less common): Policy-as-code across pipelines and clusters, zero-trust patterns

• Example questions or scenarios:

  • "How do you rotate secrets across environments without downtime?"
  • "Design a pipeline with supply-chain integrity from commit to deploy."
  • "What’s your approach to least privilege for CI runners?"

This visualization highlights the most frequent topics from recent candidate reports and role expectations—typically clustering around Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and incident response. Use it to prioritize your study plan and to calibrate depth: topics appearing larger usually attract multi-layered follow-up questions.

Key Responsibilities

You will own the reliability and delivery toolchain for core services powering the Poshmark marketplace. That means defining standards, codifying best practices, and enabling teams to ship frequently with guardrails. You’ll convert operational knowledge into automation, documentation, and platform abstractions that scale across engineering.

• Design and operate cloud infrastructure supporting production services with availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency as first-class goals.
• Build and evolve CI/CD to deliver fast, safe releases—including progressive delivery patterns, automated rollbacks, and artifact hygiene.
• Own observability by defining SLOs/SLIs, instrumenting services, and refining alerting to reduce noise and MTTR.
• Drive incident response: lead on-call improvements, facilitate postmortems, turn learnings into durable fixes and runbooks.
• Advance security posture through least privilege, secrets management, and supply-chain controls in pipelines and clusters.
• Enable developers via paved paths, golden templates, internal docs, and training that reduce friction and variance.

You will collaborate daily with backend engineers, data teams, QA, and product managers to design for reliability early. Expect to lead cross-team initiatives like cluster upgrades, pipeline refactors, and cost optimization programs that directly impact roadmap velocity and user experience.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

Poshmark looks for DevOps engineers who turn operational excellence into leverage for the whole org. You should be comfortable owning outcomes, not just tools, and you must communicate clearly across levels—from ICs to leadership.

• Must-have technical skills

  • Cloud & Linux fundamentals: VPC design, IAM, routing, security groups, Linux internals, shell proficiency
  • Containers & Kubernetes: Docker, k8s deployments/services/ingress, HPA, resource management, troubleshooting
  • CI/CD & IaC: GitHub/GitLab Actions or Jenkins, artifact repositories, Terraform (modules, state, workspaces), GitOps patterns
  • Observability & SRE: Metrics/logs/traces, SLOs, alerting strategy, incident response, runbook culture
  • Security basics: Secrets management, least privilege, image scanning, TLS/mTLS

• Experience level

  • 3–6+ years in DevOps/SRE/platform engineering roles with direct production ownership
  • Demonstrated impact on deployment speed, reliability, and cost with measurable outcomes

• Soft skills that distinguish

  • Influence through clarity: crisp docs, compelling diagrams, constructive reviews
  • Bias for automation: reducing toil and variance with tooling and templates
  • Calm under pressure: clear incident leadership and stakeholder communication

• Nice-to-have

  • Service mesh experience, policy-as-code (OPA), progressive delivery controllers (Argo Rollouts/Flagger), data pipeline reliability, FinOps exposure

This module summarizes compensation ranges reported for DevOps roles comparable to this position. Use it to benchmark your expectations and to anchor conversations around total rewards, including base, equity, and benefits. Actual offers vary with location, seniority, and demonstrated impact.

Common Interview Questions

Below are representative questions aligned with what candidates report and what this role demands. Use them to rehearse structured, outcome-focused answers grounded in your experience.

Technical / Domain Knowledge

You will face deep, practical questions about your tooling choices and operational decisions.

• How would you design a resilient, cost-efficient architecture for a user-facing API with spiky traffic?
• Walk through your approach to securing secrets across CI/CD and runtime environments.
• Compare blue/green, canary, and rolling updates. When do you choose each at Poshmark scale?
• Explain how you’d debug DNS-related failures inside Kubernetes.
• How have you instrumented a service to meet specific SLOs?

System Design / Architecture

Expect open-ended scenarios where trade-offs and risk management matter most.

• Design a multi-tenant Kubernetes platform with team-level isolation and shared services.
• Propose an observability architecture that enables end-to-end tracing across microservices.
• How would you architect progressive delivery with automatic rollback on SLO violations?
• Plan a zero-downtime database migration strategy for a high-traffic service.
• Outline a disaster recovery plan with defined RTO/RPO and cost considerations.

CI/CD, IaC, and Automation

Interviewers look for reproducibility and guardrails at scale.

• Describe a CI/CD pipeline you built: stages, gates, artifacts, rollback strategy.
• How do you structure Terraform modules for reuse and safe evolution?
• What’s your strategy for handling Terraform state in multi-environment, multi-team setups?
• How have you implemented ephemeral environments for PR validation?
• What policies would you enforce to keep pipelines secure and compliant?

Observability, SRE, and Incidents

Demonstrate how you move from detection to durable prevention.

• An on-call page fires for elevated error rates in checkout. What are your first three actions?
• How do you select SLIs for a marketplace search service?
• Show how you used tracing to find a latency regression between services.
• What made your postmortems effective, and what changed as a result?
• How do you prevent alert fatigue while maintaining coverage?

Behavioral / Leadership

These explore ownership, communication, and cross-team influence.

• Tell us about a time you standardized tooling across teams. How did you drive adoption?
• Describe your most challenging incident. How did you lead and what did you change afterward?
• When have you pushed back on a risky release? Outcome?
• How do you balance speed and safety when product deadlines loom?
• Share a time you reduced costs without hurting reliability. How did you align stakeholders?

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the interview, and how long should I prepare?
Most candidates describe the process as medium-to-hard, with depth in Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC, and SRE. Allocate 2–4 weeks to refresh fundamentals and to prepare 6–8 strong project stories with metrics.

Q: What makes successful candidates stand out?
Clear problem-solving under pressure, measurable impact (MTTR, deployment frequency, cost), and the ability to explain trade-offs succinctly. Hands-on demos or artifacts (dashboards, modules, pipelines) leave a strong impression.

Q: What is the culture like for DevOps at Poshmark?
Collaborative, pragmatic, and user-focused. Engineers value reliability as a feature and invest in paved paths that help teams ship fast without compromising safety.

Q: What is the typical timeline and communication cadence?
Timelines vary with staffing needs, but you should expect a focused process with timely updates after each stage. Proactive follow-ups and scheduling flexibility help maintain momentum.

Q: Are interviews remote? What about the role location?
Expect virtual interviews (Zoom) with collaborative whiteboarding/diagramming. Role location and hybrid expectations vary by team; confirm specifics with your recruiter early.

Other General Tips

• Anchor answers with metrics: Quantify improvements (e.g., "-45% MTTR, +3x deploys/day"). Numbers make your impact concrete.
• Tell end-to-end stories: Problem → hypothesis → constraints → solution → trade-offs → results → lessons. This structure resonates across interviewers.
• Show your tooling judgment: Explain not just what you used, but why it beat alternatives and how you validated that choice.
• Bring artifacts: Sanitized pipeline YAMLs, Terraform modules, dashboards, and runbooks make discussions faster and more credible.
• Practice live debugging: Be ready to narrate your terminal workflow—logs, metrics, traces, kubectl—like you would on-call.
• Clarify requirements before designing: Ask for SLOs, constraints, traffic patterns, and failure domains. Good questions are rewarded.

Summary & Next Steps

The DevOps Engineer role at Poshmark is a force multiplier: you will harden infrastructure, accelerate delivery, and turn reliability into a product advantage. You’ll partner across engineering to create paved paths that make shipping fast, safe, and observable—especially during high-traffic moments that define our marketplace experience.

Focus your preparation on five pillars: cloud and networking fundamentals, Kubernetes and platform engineering, CI/CD and IaC, observability and SRE practices, and security woven into delivery. Pair this with crisp, quantified stories that demonstrate ownership, trade-off clarity, and durable impact.

Approach your interviews with confidence. You have built systems, learned from incidents, and turned those lessons into automation and standards—now showcase it. For additional insights, compensation benchmarking, and company-specific trends, explore Dataford. You’re ready—lean into your experience, communicate with clarity, and lead with outcomes.