Design the pipeline for a typical web application. What stages would you have, and in what order?
What they are really testing: Whether you order stages by feedback speed or just list every tool you have heard of. They want to see the cheap fast checks gating the slow expensive ones.
A real interview question
Design the pipeline for a typical web application. What stages would you have, and in what order?
What most people say
drag me
“Build, test, deploy.”
It is technically the right shape but shows no thinking about ordering, security scanning, artifact promotion, or where a human decision belongs. Every candidate says this, so it distinguishes nobody.
The follow-ups they ask next
Where would you put database migrations?
As a separate step before the app deploy, written to be backward compatible so the old and new app versions can both run during rollout. Never as part of app startup.
What runs on a pull request versus on main?
PRs get the fast gates: lint, unit, build, scan. Main additionally gets integration, staging deploy and promotion. The split keeps PR feedback under a few minutes.
What the interviewer is listening for
- Orders by feedback speed and says so
- Builds once and promotes
- Puts security scanning in the pipeline
What sinks the answer
- Lists tools instead of stages
- Rebuilds per environment
- No security step at all
If you genuinely do not know
Say this instead of freezing. Reasoning out loud from what you do know beats silence every single time, and a good interviewer is listening for exactly that.
“I order by feedback speed: [lint and unit tests first], then [build and tag by sha, scan the image], then [integration tests], then [deploy to staging and smoke test], then [promote the same artifact to production behind a gate].”
Keep going with ci/cd
Foundation
What is the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment?
Foundation
Why should the same build artifact be promoted through environments instead of rebuilding for each one?
Mid
Our pipeline takes 45 minutes and developers have stopped waiting for it. How do you fix that?
Mid
A test fails about 1 in 5 runs. The team wants to add an automatic retry. What is your view?
Senior
You inherit 200 Jenkins jobs with no documentation and are asked to migrate to a modern CI system. How do you approach it?
Junior
Our Docker image is 1.2 GB and takes 8 minutes to build. How would you make it smaller and faster?
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