IntermediateBehavioral
Behavioral: Describe a time you led a deployment pipeline improvement that reduced lead time for changes. Walk me through the situation, the task you owned, the actions you took, and the measurable result.
DevOps Engineer
General

Sample Answer

Situation: Our release cadence was weekly, with mean lead time for changes ~14 days and frequent rollbacks (6% of releases). Task: As the DevOps engineer, I was tasked to reduce lead time and rollback rate while keeping uptime. Action: I ran a value-stream mapping, identified CI flakiness and long manual approvals, and proposed automated gated pipelines. I implemented parallelized unit/integration test stages in Jenkins, introduced feature-flagged progressive releases via Spinnaker, and replaced two manual approval gates with policy-as-code using OPA. I also added pipeline observability with Prometheus/Grafana to track build/test times. Result: Within three months lead time decreased from 14 to 4 days (71% reduction), deployment frequency rose from 1/week to 4/week, and rollback rate dropped from 6% to 1.5%. Build stability improved: average pipeline success rate increased from 85% to 96%. These metrics convinced leadership to standardize the pipeline across three teams.

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