DevSecOps Engineer Interview Questions UK: 8 Real Questions and What Interviewers Want

Before your DevSecOps Engineer interview, it helps to see the questions from the interviewer's side. We have picked eight from our set of 16 and added the reason each one gets asked.

Eight DevSecOps Engineer interview questions, and what the interviewer is thinking

1. How would you secure infrastructure as code written in Terraform before it reaches production?

Why they ask: IaC security is central to a DevSecOps engineer's remit.

2. How do you manage secrets across applications, pipelines and Kubernetes?

Why they ask: Secrets sprawl is among the most common real-world DevSecOps problems.

3. How would you harden a GitHub Actions or GitLab CI pipeline against compromise?

Why they ask: Pipelines are high-value targets, and they want specific hardening knowledge.

4. What does a DevSecOps Engineer do day to day, and how does the role differ from application security or traditional security operations?

Why they ask: They check understanding of how the role sits among security disciplines.

5. What are the key controls for securing Kubernetes clusters at the cluster, workload and network levels?

Why they ask: Kubernetes security is a staple area for DevSecOps roles.

6. How do you secure container images, from base image selection through to the registry?

Why they ask: Image security is a practical, frequently tested topic.

7. A deployment pipeline fails on a critical vulnerability in a base image the evening before a major release. What do you do?

Why they ask: They are testing pragmatic risk handling under delivery pressure.

8. Tell me about a time you automated a security control within a CI/CD pipeline and what impact it had.

Why they ask: They want evidence of delivering practical automation rather than manual gates.

A sample answer to question 1

How would you secure infrastructure as code written in Terraform before it reaches production?

I'd treat Terraform like any other code. Pull requests need peer review, and the pipeline runs static analysis, using Checkov, tfsec or Trivy config, to catch issues such as public storage buckets, open security groups, unencrypted volumes and over-permissive IAM policies, failing the build on high-severity misconfigurations. Beyond static scanning, I'd use policy as code, with Open Policy Agent or Sentinel, to enforce organisational rules such as approved regions, mandatory tagging and encryption with customer-managed keys. Terraform plans would be reviewed before apply, with the plan output checked against policy rather than just the code. State files contain secrets, so I'd store them in a remote backend with encryption, locking and tight access, and never commit them. Credentials for the pipeline should be short-lived through OIDC federation, scoped to the environment. Drift detection would run regularly, and I'd keep modules versioned and signed from a trusted registry so teams reuse hardened building blocks.

Common mistake to avoid: Scanning only after deployment; Committing state files

Want the rest?

Full model answers, key points and common mistakes for all 16 questions are on the DevSecOps Engineer interview questions page. The first five are free, no sign-up needed.