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

Applying for a Infrastructure Engineer job in the UK? Here is what you are likely to be asked. These questions come from our Infrastructure Engineer question bank of 12 questions, written for UK employers at mid-level level.

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

1. Why do you want to work as an Infrastructure Engineer, and what does the role involve day to day?

Why they ask: They want to see genuine interest in the platform side of IT and realistic expectations of the work.

2. How do you manage Terraform state and avoid configuration drift when several engineers work on the same environment?

Why they ask: Terraform is widely used, and state management is where real-world mistakes happen.

3. What are the options for connecting an on-premises network to Azure or AWS, and how would you choose between them?

Why they ask: Hybrid connectivity is a common design choice, and they want to hear trade-offs rather than product names.

4. You are on call and an alert shows a production Linux server's disk is 98 per cent full. What do you do?

Why they ask: A realistic on-call scenario testing quick, safe diagnosis under pressure.

5. How would you design high availability and disaster recovery for a business-critical web application, and how do RTO and RPO influence your design?

Why they ask: They want to hear whether you can match architecture to business requirements and cost.

6. Users report that an application is crawling, and you find its Linux server has a very high load average. What would you do?

Why they ask: This tests practical Linux troubleshooting depth beyond simply running top.

7. Tell me about a time you delivered an infrastructure project: what was your role, and what went well or badly?

Why they ask: They want to see ownership, planning and honest reflection, not just a list of technologies.

8. A developer asks you to open a firewall rule to allow inbound access from the internet to a test server, saying it is urgent. How do you respond?

Why they ask: They want to see security judgement balanced with helpfulness to engineers.

A sample answer to question 1

Why do you want to work as an Infrastructure Engineer, and what does the role involve day to day?

I enjoy infrastructure because everything else depends on it, so good engineering there quietly makes the whole organisation more reliable. A normal day might involve reviewing monitoring and overnight alerts, picking up tickets escalated from support, working on a project such as building a new Azure landing zone or refreshing a hypervisor cluster, and reviewing changes with colleagues before they go live. I also spend time on patching, capacity planning and keeping documentation and diagrams current. I like that the job rewards both depth and breadth, from networking and storage to Linux, Windows and cloud, and that it is increasingly about automation with tools such as Terraform and Ansible rather than clicking through consoles. What motivates me most is solving complex faults methodically, and seeing the improvements, such as fewer incidents or faster builds, that come from doing the job properly.

Common mistake to avoid: Saying you like computers with no detail; Ignoring on-call and support duties

Want the rest?

Full model answers, key points and common mistakes for all 12 questions are on the Infrastructure Engineer interview questions page. The first five are free, no sign-up needed.