Automation and Scripting Questions

Covers practical and architectural skills for writing production safe automation and operational scripts as well as building reusable automation systems. Topics include designing idempotent automation, safe retries, robust error handling, structured logging and observability, argument parsing and command line interface design, configuration management, and secure credential handling. Emphasis on testing and validation of scripts and automation code, packaging, documentation, deployment, and maintainability so automation can be operated by other team members. Includes integration with schedulers such as cron and systemd timers, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, orchestration and configuration management systems, and common operational patterns such as log processing, backups, polling, multi step orchestration, provisioning, configuration changes, and routine maintenance. Also assesses language selection and trade offs among Python, Go, Bash and other tooling, concurrency and performance considerations, and at senior levels the design and architecture of reusable automation frameworks and strategies for scaling automation to reduce toil.

MediumTechnical

126 practiced

As an SRE lead, prepare a checklist to ensure automation code is maintainable and operable by other engineers. Include coding standards, documentation requirements, runbooks, owner labels, test coverage requirements, CI gating, metrics to emit, and on-call handoff instructions.

HardSystem Design

84 practiced

Design a GitOps-based release flow for multiple interdependent services: propose repository layouts (mono-repo vs multi-repo), describe how artifacts are promoted between environments, how to model cross-repo dependencies and atomic promotions, automated gating and owner approvals, and emergency hotfix paths. Include reconciliation and conflict handling.

MediumBehavioral

81 practiced

Tell me about a time when an automation you owned caused an outage or major incident. Use the STAR format: describe the Situation, Task, Action you took to mitigate, Results, and the concrete changes you implemented to prevent recurrence. Focus on learning, accountability, and technical remediation.

MediumTechnical

77 practiced

You are building automation that calls an external payment API. Describe a robust error-handling strategy: include timeouts, retries with exponential backoff and jitter, idempotency keys for non-idempotent endpoints, circuit-breaker logic, alerting thresholds, and how to surface incidents to operators without causing noise.

MediumTechnical

93 practiced

Design an idempotent automation that consumes JSON log files from S3, aggregates hourly error counts per service, writes those metrics to a TSDB, and records a checkpoint so files are not double-processed. Explain how you'd achieve idempotency, checkpointing, and trade-offs between exactly-once and at-least-once processing.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of Automation and Scripting interview questions and detailed answers.

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.