Cracking the cloud engineer interview

October 10, 2025

A practical guide to preparing for cloud engineer interviews from someone who's been on both sides of the table.

Last Updated: October 2025

Most cloud engineer interviews start with a recruiter call, then if everything's in place, you'll move on to technical screens. Technical screens are usually job-focused-- they'll be heavily based on the needs of the job, which you can glean from the job description. Some companies will stick to high-level overviews, some will ask you to implement the things you're asked about, some will require take-home assignments or even test you on software engineering ability. This guide breaks down what to study, how to practice, and what interviewers really care about.

What Cloud Engineering Interviews Actually Test

Unlike software engineering interviews with heavy emphasis on algorithms and data structures, cloud engineer interviews focus on cloud platform knowledge, tool knowledge (CI/CD, IaC, etc.), and operational knowledge. Here's what you'll face:

Core infrastructure knowledge: Networks (VPCs, subnets, routing, DNS), compute (VMs, containers, serverless), storage (block, object, database), and identity (IAM, RBAC).
Infrastructure as code: Writing or debugging Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, or Pulumi to provision reproducible environments.
CI/CD and release automation: Designing pipelines with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps. Explaining build-test-deploy workflows and rollback strategies.
Troubleshooting and incident response: Reading logs, interpreting metrics, diagnosing outages, and explaining how you'd restore service under pressure.
Security and compliance: Secrets management, least-privilege IAM, network segmentation, vulnerability scanning, and policy-as-code.
Scenario-based problem-solving: "A deployment breaks production at 3 AM-- walk me through your response." "Design a highly available multi-region application." "How would you reduce cloud costs by 30%?"

Behavioral rounds assess soft skills-- communication, collaboration, handling disagreements, mentoring junior engineers-- because DevOps jobs demand cross-functional teamwork as much as technical chops.

Sample Questions

Azure Fundamentals

Some of the most common Azure interview questions include:

Explain tenants, management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups. How do they differ?
What PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS services have you worked with on Azure? Tell me about them.
How do you deploy resources to Azure? Explain ARM, Bicep, and Terraform.
What’s the difference between Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway, and Front Door?
How would you increase availability for a web application? How would you make it fault-tolerant?
Explain Entra ID. How do you configure it to secure your applications? Does it work with hybrid environments?
Explain IAM permissions including user groups and roles. What are Azure policies? What is RBAC and how do you implement that in Azure?
Explain Azure Key Vault. How do you manage secrets in Azure? How would you use those secrets in a CI/CD pipeline?

AWS Fundamentals

Some of the most common AWS interview questions include:

Explain EC2 instance types and pricing models (on-demand, reserved, spot).
What's the difference between S3, EBS, and EFS storage; when to use each.
How do VPCs, subnets, NAT gateways, and route tables interact on AWS?
Explain IAM roles vs users vs policies; how do you grant cross-account access?
Describe CloudFormation and Terraform usage in AWS IaC. What are the pros and cons?
What’s the difference between ALB, NLB, and Gateway Load Balancer?
How do Auto Scaling Groups and Launch Templates work together?
Describe how to set up CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and Config. How do they complement each other?
How do ECS, EKS, and Lambda differ for workloads? What considerations would you make for each?

GCP Fundamentals

Some of the most common GCP interview questions include:

Explain how projects, folders, and organizations work on GCP. What is the resource hierarchy?
Describe VPC networks, subnets, Shared VPC, and VPC peering.
Difference between Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Run, and GKE. When would you use one over the other?
Explain how Service Accounts and IAM roles work. What is a Workload Identity?
How do you manage network egress costs and optimize inter-region traffic? How would you set up FinOps/cloud cost management?
Describe Cloud Storage classes and lifecycle management policies. What sort of files would you keep in each?
What tools exist for IaC on GCP and how do they differ?
Explain Stackdriver components: Logging, Monitoring, Tracing, Error Reporting.
Describe Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and BigQuery integration for event pipelines. How do you configure multiple services to work together?
How do you secure a GCP environment using Organization Policies, VPC Service Controls, and Cloud Armor?

Networking Essentials

Almost every cloud engineer interview will include networking questions. Some common questions are:

What is a VPC?
How does {provider} do VPCs?
Explain how Vnets, subnets, and routing work in {provider}.
What is a routing table? How do you implement routing in {provider}?
What is a security group? How do you implement security groups in {provider}?
What is a load balancer? What types of load balancers does {provider} have?

Brush up on OSI layers, TCP/IP, DNS resolution flow, and TLS/SSL termination-- these are foundations that never go away. There are more networking questions, but this is a good start.

Terraform

Terraform is the most common IaC tool. The principal advantage of Terraform over cloud-native solutions like CloudFormation or Bicep is that it is multi-cloud. Most major companies have some components on multiple cloud providers, and Terraform is the easiest way to manage that. Additionally, some companies are afraid of vendor lock-in. Using Terraform is a way to allow companies to more easily move between cloud providers; this, of course, is super rare.

What is a state file?
Explain the Terraform backend. What is the difference between local and remote backends? When would you use each?
What is the difference between a resource and a data source?
How do you handle secrets in Terraform? How can you make sure that secrets aren't revealed in the state file? In the deployment logs?
Explain some of the common keywords: providers, resources, data sources, modules, state management, workspaces, backends.

Kubernetes

Not every company uses Kubernetes, but the ones that do are prone to grilling interviewees on it. Some common questions are:

What is a pod? What is a container?
What is a deployment? What is a service?
What is a stateful set? What is a daemon set?
What are the types of probes? What is a readiness probe? What is a liveness probe?
Explain what a sidecar container is. Explain what an init container is.
How do you run K8s on {provider}? There are multiple ways to do this; on Azure, for example, explain the difference between AKS, container apps, and container instances.
What is kubectl? How do you use it? What are some of the commands you use most often?
How are ConfigMaps, Secrets, and Environment Variables injected into Pods.
How do you update/upgrade a cluster? How do you do it with no downtime?

CI/CD and Build Pipelines

Interviewers may ask you to design a deployment pipeline or troubleshoot a broken build. Core concepts:

Pipeline stages: Checkout, install dependencies, run tests (unit, integration), build artifacts, publish and deploy, smoke tests.
Branching strategies: Trunk-based development, GitFlow, feature branches, release branches.
Deployment patterns: Blue-green, canary, rolling updates, immutable infrastructure. Automated rollback on failure, manual rollback via previous artifact versions, database migration challenges.See our guide on incremental release strategies for a deeper dive.

Practice building a simple pipeline: clone a repo, run tests, build a Docker image, push to a registry, deploy to Kubernetes or a serverless function. Get a starter pipeline working on GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps, then gradually add more steps.

Monitoring, Logging, and Observability

Hiring managers want engineers who can instrument systems and respond to alerts. Key topics:

Metrics: CPU, memory, disk I/O, network throughput, request latency, error rates. Tools like Prometheus, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor.
Logs: Centralized logging (ELK Stack, CloudWatch Logs, Azure Log Analytics), structured logging, log correlation.
Traces: Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, X-Ray, Jaeger to track requests across microservices.
Alerting: Defining SLIs/SLOs, setting thresholds, alert fatigue, on-call runbooks.

Practice creating a dashboard for a sample app: track request rates, latency percentiles, error rates (the "golden signals"), and set up alerts. This can be hard to do on a sample app, but make sure you understand the concepts at a high level.

Final Prep Checklist: One Week Before Your Interview

Review fundamentals: Cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or cloud-native), Networking (VPC, routing, DNS), IAM (least privilege, and RBAC).
Rehearse your projects: Practice a 5-minute pitch for each project, anticipating follow-up questions on architecture, trade-offs, and outcomes. Don't be afraid to talk to yourself, rehearsing your answers really helps.
Mock technical questions: Solve 5–10 cloud interview questions covering IaC, CI/CD, troubleshooting, and system design. The more, the better.
Research the company: Read their tech blog, read through the job posting to understand their tech stack, and prepare thoughtful questions about their infrastructure challenges.
Prepare questions: Ask about on-call rotation, team structure, tooling preferences, deployment frequency, career growth opportunities, and how they measure success.
Rest and logistics: Get good sleep, test your video setup, have a backup internet connection, and keep water nearby.

The Bottom Line: Master the Basics, Prove Your Work, and Show You Fit

Cloud engineering interviews boil down to three things: knowing your tech, proving you can do the work, and showing you're someone people want on their team. Startups want someone who's going to move fast and not require handholding, big corporations want someone more cautious. It's important to communicate, directly or indirectly, that you understand their needs and are the person for the job.

For more career guidance, check out what does a cloud engineer do and how long does it take to become a cloud engineer.