DevOps and SRE Interview Questions India 2026: Complete Engineer Guide

DevOps Engineer: focuses on automating and accelerating software delivery. Core responsibilities: CI/CD pipeline design (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD for GitOps), infrastructure as code (Terraform for provisioning, Ansible for configuration management), container orchestration (Kubernetes cluster management, helm chart development), developer platform tooling (internal developer platforms, build system optimisation, environment management), and cloud cost optimisation. SRE (Site Reliability Engineer): applies software engineering principles to operations problems. Core responsibilities: defining SLOs and error budgets, building observability systems (Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing), leading incident response (on-call rotation, incident commander role, postmortems), toil elimination through automation (replacing repetitive ops tasks with code), and capacity planning. At companies under 100 engineers in India, the roles merge. At Swiggy, Flipkart, and Razorpay, SRE is a distinct function with strong software engineering requirements and significant on-call responsibility.

Kubernetes depth tested in India: pod troubleshooting (diagnose CrashLoopBackOff: check logs with kubectl logs, describe the pod for Events section, check resource limits and liveness probe configuration), deployment strategies (rolling update: maxSurge and maxUnavailable; blue-green: parallel deployment with service cutover; canary: weighted traffic split with ingress controller), resource management (requests vs limits, impact of CPU throttling vs memory OOM kill), HPA and VPA (when to use each, metric server vs custom metrics), networking (kube-proxy modes: iptables vs IPVS; CNI plugins: Calico vs Flannel vs Cilium; NetworkPolicy for pod-to-pod access control; ingress controllers: nginx vs Traefik vs Ambassador). Terraform depth: resource dependency graph, state management (remote state with S3 backend and DynamoDB lock for state locking), modules (input variables, output values, module composition), and import of existing infrastructure.

Senior SRE interviews go beyond tools to reliability engineering principles: SLOs and error budgets (define an SLO for the Swiggy checkout API: 99.9% success rate over 30 days, p99 latency under 800ms. Error budget: 0.1% of 30 days = 43 minutes of allowable downtime. SLO breach triggers a reliability sprint: new feature work pauses until the budget is restored). Capacity planning (how do you project infrastructure for Diwali sale traffic 3 months ahead? Load test to find saturation points at current traffic, extrapolate growth trend, add 50% headroom buffer for unexpected spikes, plan for 10x traffic peaks at specific hours). Incident management lifecycle (detection via alerting threshold trigger, triage using runbooks, mitigation: rollback or circuit breaker activation, communication: status page update every 15 minutes, postmortem: 5-whys root cause, action items with owners and due dates). Chaos engineering (fault injection testing: terminate random pods, introduce artificial latency on network calls, simulate availability zone failure — validate recovery procedures under controlled conditions).

DevOps and SRE salary benchmarks: Junior (0-2 years): Rs 10-22 LPA at product companies. Mid-level (2-5 years): Rs 22-55 LPA. Senior (5-8 years): Rs 50-95 LPA. Staff / Principal SRE (8+ years): Rs 85-160 LPA. Top employers and salary ranges (mid-level): Google SRE India (Hyderabad and Bengaluru): Rs 80-200 LPA total comp — the highest SRE compensation in India. Flipkart SRE: Rs 35-80 LPA. Swiggy Infrastructure: Rs 30-70 LPA. Razorpay Reliability: Rs 30-70 LPA. Amazon India (operational excellence and AWS reliability teams): Rs 30-75 LPA. Microsoft India (Azure reliability engineering): Rs 25-65 LPA. DevOps engineers at cloud-native startups earn Rs 15-45 LPA mid-level but get broader on-call exposure and ownership earlier.