TCS
Large multinational IT services and consulting enterprise based in India.
3 Rounds
~14 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
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Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you accidentally caused a production outage. How did you handle it, and what was the post-mortem process?
#Incident Management
#Accountability
#Continuous Improvement
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
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hard
A client insists on using a legacy manual deployment method instead of migrating to a modern CI/CD pipeline. How do you convince them of the ROI of DevOps practices?
#Client Communication
#DevOps Culture
#Negotiation
DevOps Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Describe a situation where you had to collaborate with a difficult development team that resisted adopting DevOps standards like unit testing and code reviews.
#Collaboration
#Conflict Resolution
#DevOps Culture
DevOps Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
At TCS, you often work across different time zones with offshore and onsite teams. How do you ensure seamless communication and handover of critical DevOps tasks?
#Communication
#Global Teams
#Process
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Write a Bash script to parse an Nginx access log and find the top 5 IP addresses with the most HTTP 500 errors.
#Bash
#Log Parsing
#Linux Commands
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script using the `boto3` library to find and delete all unattached EBS volumes in an AWS region.
#Python
#AWS
#Boto3
#Automation
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
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easy
Write a Bash one-liner to find all files in `/var/log` modified in the last 7 days and archive them into a tarball.
#Bash
#Linux Commands
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Write a Python script to monitor a specific URL. If it returns a non-200 status code 3 times in a row, trigger a Slack webhook.
#Python
#Monitoring
#API Integration
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a Blue-Green deployment strategy for a monolithic application being migrated to AWS. How do you handle database schema changes during the switch?
#AWS
#Blue-Green Deployment
#Database Migration
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a highly available and fault-tolerant 3-tier architecture on AWS for a banking client. Include networking, compute, and database layers.
#AWS
#High Availability
#Networking
#Databases
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a disaster recovery strategy for a production Kubernetes cluster hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
#Azure
#Kubernetes
#Disaster Recovery
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
A client wants to migrate a legacy on-premise application to AWS. Walk me through the 6 R's of cloud migration and which one you would recommend for a quick exit from a data center.
#Cloud Migration
#AWS
#Strategy
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you troubleshoot a Linux server that is responding very slowly, but the `top` command shows low CPU and memory usage?
#Linux
#Troubleshooting
#I/O Wait
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the difference between `git merge` and `git rebase`. When would you use one over the other in a collaborative team environment?
#Git
#Collaboration
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
How do you implement a Jenkins declarative pipeline that uses Shared Libraries to enforce mandatory security scanning (like SonarQube and Trivy) across 50+ microservices?
#Jenkins
#Groovy
#DevSecOps
#Automation
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Your Docker image size is over 2GB, causing slow pipeline builds and deployments. What specific steps would you take to optimize and reduce the image size?
#Docker
#Optimization
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
A Pod in your Kubernetes cluster is stuck in the `CrashLoopBackOff` state. Walk me through your exact troubleshooting steps.
#Kubernetes
#Troubleshooting
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain how you would expose a set of microservices running in a Kubernetes cluster to the public internet securely using an Ingress Controller and cert-manager.
#Kubernetes
#Networking
#Security
#TLS
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
In Terraform, how do you handle a situation where someone manually modified a security group in the AWS console that was originally provisioned by Terraform?
#Terraform
#State Management
#AWS
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
Explain how you structure Terraform code for multiple environments (Dev, QA, Prod) to maximize reuse and minimize the blast radius.
#Terraform
#Architecture
#Best Practices
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Write an Ansible playbook strategy to patch 500 Linux VMs with zero downtime for the highly available application running on them.
#Ansible
#Automation
#Zero Downtime
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you securely grant an EC2 instance access to read objects from a specific S3 bucket without hardcoding AWS credentials?
#AWS
#IAM
#Security
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
How do you set up Prometheus and Grafana to monitor custom application metrics, and how do you handle high cardinality data?
#Prometheus
#Grafana
#Monitoring
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you integrate container image vulnerability scanning into an Azure DevOps pipeline, and how do you handle false positives?
#Azure DevOps
#Security
#Containers
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
What is the difference between a StatefulSet and a Deployment in Kubernetes? Give a real-world scenario where you must use a StatefulSet.
#Kubernetes
#Architecture
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
You get a 'No space left on device' error on a Linux server, but `df -h` shows 50% free disk space. What is the issue and how do you fix it?
#Linux
#Troubleshooting
#Filesystems
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
A developer accidentally pushed a commit containing an AWS secret key to the remote `main` branch. What are the immediate steps you take to remediate this?
#Git
#Security
#Incident Response
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the concept of GitOps. How does it differ from traditional push-based CI/CD pipelines?
#GitOps
#Kubernetes
#ArgoCD
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
Explain the packet flow when a user types a URL in their browser and it hits a Kubernetes service backed by an external cloud load balancer.
#Kubernetes
#Networking
#DNS
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
What are AWS VPC Endpoints, and why would a financial client require them instead of using a NAT Gateway for S3 access?
#AWS
#Networking
#Security
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you manage secrets (like database passwords) when provisioning infrastructure with Terraform?
#Terraform
#Security
#Secret Management
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
How do you handle database migrations in an automated CI/CD pipeline without causing application downtime?
#Database
#Automation
#Zero Downtime
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the ELK stack architecture. What happens if Logstash becomes a bottleneck, and how do you scale the logging infrastructure?
#ELK
#Logging
#Architecture
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
What is the difference between `ENTRYPOINT` and `CMD` in a Dockerfile? How do they interact if both are specified?
#Docker
#Best Practices
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you implement resource quotas and limits in Kubernetes? What happens if a pod exceeds its memory limit versus its CPU limit?
#Kubernetes
#Resource Management
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