"Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager or a lead engineer on an infrastructure or reliability decision. For example, this could have been around a production rollout, capacity planning, incident response follow-up, or a change in a service running on Meta infrastructure. How did you handle the disagreement, and what was the outcome?"
In a DevOps Engineer role at Meta, you will often need to challenge decisions respectfully when reliability, operational risk, or execution speed are in tension. I want to understand whether you can influence upward or laterally without turning disagreement into friction, and whether you stay focused on the best outcome for the service, team, and users.
I'm also looking for how you operate under ambiguity: what facts you gathered, how you communicated trade-offs, whether you understood the other person's constraints, and what you did after the decision was made.
A strong answer uses one specific example with real stakes, explains both sides of the disagreement, and shows a data-driven approach rather than opinion alone. The best responses make clear whether your view won or not, how you committed afterward, what measurable result followed, and what you learned about handling future disagreements.