EY
Ernst & Young Global Limited, a multinational professional services partnership.
4 Rounds
~21 Days
Medium
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you faced significant pushback from a client's development team regarding the adoption of strict CI/CD quality gates (like SonarQube coverage limits). How did you handle it?
#Client Management
#Communication
#DevSecOps
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Describe a situation where you had to quickly learn a new technology or tool because a client mandated it, despite having no prior experience with it.
#Adaptability
#Continuous Learning
#Consulting
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you identified a bottleneck in a software delivery process and took the initiative to automate or improve it.
#Process Improvement
#Automation
#Initiative
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
hard
You are leading a DevOps transformation for a client whose operations team is used to manual, ticket-based deployments. How do you win their trust and transition them to an IaC and CI/CD model?
#Change Management
#Consulting
#Empathy
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time when you made a critical mistake that caused an outage or broke a deployment pipeline. How did you handle it, and what did you learn?
#Accountability
#Incident Management
#Post-mortem
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to balance a tight project deadline with the need to implement proper security and compliance controls.
#Time Management
#Security
#Prioritization
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script that parses a large Nginx access log file, counts the occurrences of HTTP 5xx errors, and outputs the top 5 IP addresses generating these errors.
#Python
#Log Parsing
#Data Structures
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a Bash script that finds all files in a specific directory older than 30 days, archives them into a tarball, and deletes the original files.
#Bash
#Linux
#Automation
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script using the 'requests' library to interact with a REST API. The script should authenticate using a Bearer token, fetch a list of users, and filter out users who are inactive.
#Python
#REST API
#JSON Parsing
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a Terraform module to provision an Azure Storage Account. Ensure that public network access is disabled and it only accepts traffic from a specific Virtual Network.
#Terraform
#Azure
#Networking
#Security
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a Python script that checks the SSL certificate expiration date for a given list of domains and sends an alert (prints to console) if any certificate expires in less than 30 days.
#Python
#Security
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Bash script to monitor CPU usage. If the usage exceeds 80% for 3 consecutive checks (10 seconds apart), the script should restart a specific systemd service.
#Bash
#Linux
#Monitoring
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
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hard
A financial services client wants to migrate their on-premise monolithic application to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Walk me through your system design for a highly available, secure AKS architecture.
#Kubernetes
#Azure
#High Availability
#Microservices
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a zero-downtime deployment pipeline for a mission-critical web application. Compare Blue-Green and Canary deployments, and explain which you would choose for a risk-averse banking client.
#CI/CD
#Deployment Strategies
#Traffic Routing
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a centralized logging and monitoring solution for a distributed microservices architecture spread across multiple Azure regions.
#Monitoring
#Logging
#Azure Monitor
#ELK Stack
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy for an enterprise application hosted on Azure. The client requires an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 2 hours.
#Disaster Recovery
#Azure
#RPO/RTO
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a secure, scalable CI/CD pipeline architecture for a microservices-based application with 50+ distinct services. How do you handle dependencies and pipeline sprawl?
#CI/CD
#Microservices
#Pipeline Architecture
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
A client wants to ensure that no unapproved Docker images are deployed to their production AKS cluster. How would you enforce this?
#Kubernetes
#Security
#Policy Enforcement
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
At EY, we frequently manage multi-tenant environments for different clients. How do you manage Terraform state files securely when deploying infrastructure across multiple environments (Dev, QA, Prod) and multiple clients?
#Terraform
#State Management
#Security
#Azure Storage
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
In Azure DevOps, what is the difference between Microsoft-hosted agents and self-hosted agents? When would you recommend a client use a self-hosted agent?
#Azure DevOps
#Build Agents
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
You notice a pod in a client's Kubernetes cluster is stuck in a 'CrashLoopBackOff' state. Walk me through your exact troubleshooting steps.
#Kubernetes
#Troubleshooting
#Docker
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you securely inject secrets (like database connection strings or API keys) into a Kubernetes pod without hardcoding them or exposing them in environment variables?
#Kubernetes
#Azure Key Vault
#Secrets Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
EY places a heavy emphasis on DevSecOps. How would you integrate Security (SAST, DAST, SCA) into an existing Jenkins or Azure DevOps pipeline?
#Security
#CI/CD
#Tool Integration
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA), and Cluster Autoscaler. How do they interact?
#Kubernetes
#Autoscaling
#Resource Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
A client's Terraform state file has become corrupted or out of sync with the actual cloud resources due to a manual intervention in the Azure Portal. How do you resolve this?
#Terraform
#Troubleshooting
#State Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is a Dockerfile multi-stage build? Why is it important, especially for enterprise clients with strict security and compliance requirements?
#Docker
#Security
#Optimization
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you handle database schema changes in an automated CI/CD pipeline without causing downtime or data loss?
#Databases
#Automation
#Migrations
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the concept of GitOps. How does it differ from traditional CI/CD, and what tools would you use to implement it in a Kubernetes environment?
#GitOps
#ArgoCD
#Flux
#Kubernetes
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
In Kubernetes, what is the difference between an Ingress, a LoadBalancer, and a NodePort? When would you use each?
#Kubernetes
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain how you would use Ansible to patch 500 Linux servers across different environments (Dev, QA, Prod) with minimal disruption.
#Ansible
#Linux
#Patch Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
A client's application is experiencing intermittent connection timeouts to an Azure SQL Database. How do you troubleshoot this from a network and infrastructure perspective?
#Troubleshooting
#Networking
#Azure SQL
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What are Terraform Workspaces? How do they differ from using separate directories for environments, and what are the pros/cons of each approach?
#Terraform
#Environment Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in a shared Kubernetes cluster to ensure developers can only access their specific namespaces?
#Kubernetes
#RBAC
#Security
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the concept of 'Immutable Infrastructure'. What are its benefits, and how do you achieve it using tools like Packer and Terraform?
#Immutable Infrastructure
#Packer
#Terraform
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you configure Prometheus to scrape custom metrics from a Python application, and how do you visualize them in Grafana?
#Prometheus
#Grafana
#Instrumentation
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