Hiring a Terraform / IaC 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 — Infrastructure as real software. State is where the interview gets interesting.
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
Writing Terraform is common; operating it across a team is not. State conflicts, module versioning and drift are where the experienced candidates separate themselves immediately.
02 — What the 60 minutes covers
The specific ground, not a generic checklist.
- State locking and what they do when a lock is stuck mid-apply
- Module versioning across environments without copy-paste
- Detecting and reconciling drift from manual console changes
- A refactor that required moving resources without destroying them
03 — A scenario from the round
A `terraform apply` has partially failed, leaving state inconsistent with reality in production. What do you do, in what order, and what do you refuse to do?
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
- Reaches for state surgery before understanding the divergence
- Has never used `moved` blocks or `state mv`
- Keeps environments in sync by duplicating directories
- Treats drift as a tooling bug rather than a process one
Scored on
- State discipline
- Module design
- Drift handling
- Blast-radius awareness
- Team workflow
Each dimension is scored with written rationale. You get the reasoning, not just the number.
Next step
Hiring a Terraform / IaC 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.