Hiring a Cloud / DevOps Engineer?
Your team is hiring; I run the technical round for you. One 60-minute live interview per candidate, with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours.
About the role — Owns the pipeline and the infrastructure under it. Breadth with real depth somewhere.
What you get
A 60-minute live interview with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours. No retainer; fee quoted on the scoping call.
01 — Why this role is hard to assess
The title covers everything from a CI config author to someone who owns production. CVs rarely distinguish the two, and a tool list tells you nothing about whether they have been on call for what they built.
02 — What the 60 minutes covers
The specific ground, not a generic checklist.
- A pipeline they built end to end, and what they would change about it now
- How they manage secrets, and what they do when one leaks
- Rollback strategy: what actually happens when a deploy goes wrong at 2am
- Terraform state management on a team of more than one
03 — A scenario from the round
Your deploy pipeline has started failing intermittently — roughly one run in five, no pattern you can see. Production is unaffected but the team has stopped trusting the pipeline. Talk me through your diagnosis.
Scenarios rotate between candidates so the round stays fair, and none of the published examples are used verbatim.
What I listen for
Failure modes specific to this role
- Describes tools rather than outcomes
- Has never written a rollback they had to use
- Treats "it works on my machine" problems as someone else’s
- Cannot describe a change they shipped that broke something
Scored on
- Pipeline depth
- Operational ownership
- Debugging method
- Security hygiene
- Collaboration
Each dimension is scored with written rationale. You get the reasoning, not just the number.
Next step
Hiring a Cloud / DevOps Engineer this quarter?
Fifteen minutes to agree the rubric, then I run the round. One candidate or twenty — there is no retainer and no minimum.