Technical interview guide

CI/CD Pipeline Design

Continuous integration and continuous delivery — automating the path from commit to a shippable build.

Read: 30 min
Practice MCQs: 25
Interview QA: 25
Edition: v4
Editorial status: Reviewed
Relevant for: AI EngineerDevOps EngineerForward Deployed Engineer (FDE)MLOps EngineerPlatform EngineerSite Reliability Engineer

Scope: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, NIST SSDF, SLSA v1.2, Sigstore, OCI, Kubernetes, Argo CD, and DORA guidance current 2026-08-31.

Interview QA

Treat each question like a live interview question: answer out loud first (structure, assumptions, tradeoffs), then open the model answer to spot gaps and rehearse a tighter follow-up.

Curated: 2026-10-05 · Written: 2026-09-09 · Reviewed: 2026-10-03

QA-1

Design a secure CI/CD pipeline for a growing service.

QA-2

Design a fast but trustworthy CI job graph.

QA-3

Secure CI for untrusted pull requests.

QA-4

Design artifact provenance and verification.

QA-5

Migrate from long-lived deployment keys to OIDC.

QA-6

Govern third-party pipeline actions and tools.

QA-7

Design runner isolation across trust levels.

QA-8

Design safe pipeline caching.

QA-9

Deploy progressively with automated guardrails.

QA-10

Coordinate concurrent deployments to one environment.

QA-11

Plan a backward-compatible database deployment.

QA-12

Handle a failed irreversible migration.

QA-13

Verify a release after deployment.

QA-14

Design GitOps deployment governance.

QA-15

Design a safe production approval process.

QA-16

Secure pipeline secrets and logs.

QA-17

Respond to suspected CI runner compromise.

QA-18

Reduce pipeline flakiness without hiding failures.

QA-19

Optimize a slow pipeline responsibly.

QA-20

Test the CI/CD platform itself.

QA-21

Design pipeline observability and audit.

QA-22

Measure CI/CD effectiveness without gaming.

QA-23

Migrate a legacy rebuild-per-environment pipeline.

QA-24

Review a pipeline change before merge.

QA-25