Hire DevOps Engineers

The 4 Questions to Ask Every Candidate

• "Walk me through the worst production outage you faced. How did you diagnose it, and what did you automate afterward to prevent it?"
• "How do you handle configuration drift when someone manually changes settings in the cloud console?"
• "An app needs to scale 50x in 10 minutes. Where will the infrastructure bottlenecks form, and how do you mitigate them?"
• "How do you decide what alerts wake someone up at 3 AM versus what goes into a Slack log?"

What Good Looks Like

• Idempotent infrastructure, fully automated paths to production, and deployment processes so stable and boring that they can be done on a Friday afternoon without anxiety.

Vendor Evaluation — What to Demand in Writing

• All IaC repositories and CI/CD pipelines must live in your corporate accounts from Day 1.
• Written commitment to dynamic secret injection (e.g., Vault, AWS Secrets Manager).
• Mandatory delivery of automated architecture documentation and incident response playbooks.
• Pre-configured budget alerts and resource tagging strategies to prevent cloud spend spikes.

Red Flag

• An engineer who builds complex scripts around manual processes ("click-ops") instead of embracing automation, or someone who hoards infrastructure access rather than enabling developer self-service.