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 first on fundamentals you will use daily: CI/CD, cloud architecture, observability, networking basics, security in pipelines, and incident command behaviors. Then dig into the tooling that Salesforce engineers commonly expect—automation with Python/Bash, configuration management (Chef/Puppet/Ansible), containers and Kubernetes, and logging/metrics stacks such as Splunk/ELK/Grafana/Prometheus.

• Role-related Knowledge (Technical/Domain Skills) – Interviewers look for depth in CI/CD, containers/Kubernetes, AWS primitives, Linux internals, and networking (DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS). Show fluency by explaining trade-offs you made (e.g., rollout strategies, autoscaling policies, stateful vs. stateless design) and by whiteboarding practical deployment flows.
• Problem-Solving Ability (Approach and Rigor) – Expect scenario-driven questions that surface how you triage, hypothesize, instrument, and validate. Demonstrate structured thinking under pressure: define impact, isolate signals, run controlled experiments, and communicate the next investigative step.
• Leadership (Influence Without Authority) – Salesforce DevOps roles often lead through standards, automation, and incident command. Show how you drive adoption (e.g., platform paved roads), mentor peers, and guide cross-functional teams during high-severity events with calm, clear decision-making.
• Culture Fit (Values and Collaboration) – Align with Trust, Customer Success, Innovation, Equality, Sustainability. Show empathy for users and partner teams, bias toward secure-by-default designs, and a blameless approach to learning through post-incident reviews.

Salesforce’s DevOps/SRE interview experience is hands-on, scenario-heavy, and pragmatic. You’ll move through focused conversations that test how you think, not just what you know—especially around reliability at scale, incident response, and secure cloud operations. Expect the pace to be brisk and the bar to be consistent: interviewers probe for depth, clarity, and ownership.

The process emphasizes real-world judgment. You will likely navigate ambiguous prompts, design resilient architectures with limited information, and make decisions live. Communication is evaluated throughout—clear status updates, concise trade-offs, and outcome-oriented narratives mirror how we operate in production.

This visual outlines the typical progression from recruiter conversation through technical deep dives and team interviews. Use it to plan your preparation and energy: cluster your practice around adjacent topics (e.g., CI/CD then observability), and keep concise examples ready for each round.

This module summarizes current compensation bands by level and location. Use it to calibrate expectations, interpret ranges by cost-of-living, and plan for negotiation based on skills that map to higher-impact areas (e.g., Kubernetes at scale, incident leadership, regulated environments).

CI/CD, Release Engineering, and Platform Automation

This is foundational. Interviewers assess how you design end-to-end pipelines that are fast, secure, and predictable—supporting hundreds of daily deploys without regressions. Expect to discuss artifact strategies, environment promotion models, policy-as-code, and rollback patterns.

• Be ready to go over:
  • Pipeline architecture: Trunk-based vs. GitFlow, canary/blue-green, progressive delivery, and automated rollbacks
  • Testing strategy: Unit/integration/e2e, test flakiness management, parallelization, and quality gates
  • Policy & security: Secrets management, SBOMs, signing, supply chain controls in CI/CD
  • Advanced concepts (less common): Self-service platforms (paved roads), ephemeral environments, monorepo build scaling, remote cache
• Example questions or scenarios:
  • "Design a CI/CD pipeline for a microservice fleet with zero-downtime deploys and fast rollback."
  • "How would you detect and mitigate test flakiness that intermittently blocks releases?"
  • "Walk us through your approach to integrating SAST/DAST and artifact signing without slowing engineers."

Cloud Infrastructure and Systems Design (AWS-centric)

You will be asked to assemble robust, secure, and cost-aware architectures in AWS (or a major cloud). Interviewers probe your grasp of compute, networking, storage, IAM, and the patterns that turn them into reliable platforms.

• Be ready to go over:
  • Core primitives: VPC, subnets, security groups, load balancers, autoscaling, EKS/ECS
  • Resilience: Multi-AZ design, state management, backups/DR, regional failover
  • Cost & performance: Right-sizing, caching, scaling triggers, capacity planning
  • Advanced concepts (less common): Service mesh (mTLS), cross-account IAM, transit gateways, private link patterns
• Example questions or scenarios:
  • "Design a multi-AZ service on AWS with strict egress controls and auditability."
  • "How do you approach DR objectives (RTO/RPO) for a stateful service?"
  • "Explain trade-offs between EKS, ECS, and serverless for a latency-sensitive workload."

Reliability Engineering, Observability, and Incident Response

Reliability is a first-class metric at Salesforce. You’ll be evaluated on how you instrument systems, define SLIs/SLOs, set actionable alerts, and lead during incidents. Expect to narrate real incidents, root cause analysis, and prevention at the system and process level.

• Be ready to go over:
  • Observability stack: Metrics, logs, traces; tools like Splunk/ELK, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry
  • SLOs and alerting: Error budgets, burn-rate alerts, signal-to-noise improvements
  • Incident command: Roles, communication cadence, decision logs, postmortem quality
  • Advanced concepts (less common): Adaptive alerting, chaos experiments, dark launches, traffic shadowing
• Example questions or scenarios:
  • "Define SLIs/SLOs for an API gateway and outline your alert strategy."
  • "You’re Incident Commander for a cross-region outage—walk us through your first 15 minutes."
  • "How did you reduce alert fatigue while improving MTTD/MTTR?"