MeteorOps

The DevOps Hiring Kit, a free PDF

The system MeteorOps used to hire 71 senior DevOps engineers, in one PDF.

Hire a senior you can trust without losing a quarter to it: the CV flags, the interview method and the question bank behind our 71 hires, distilled from 14,285 evaluated candidates. Read the first chapter tonight; use it on the next CV in your inbox tomorrow.

In your inbox in about 60 seconds.

14,285
candidates evaluated
71
seniors hired for our team
30
hired for client teams
4-8 mo
the market's average time to hire

Trusted by startups that ship to production every day.

What you get

Everything we use to hire, in the order you will use it.

Samples of each chapter further down, so you can judge the quality before typing your email.

A recruiter charges 20 to 25% of first-year salary to do the first two steps. The kit does them for an email.

01 · The screen

Read a CV in 30 seconds.

After 14,285 CVs, the same tells show up over and over. The one that matters most: the balance between "built / created / designed" and "maintained / documented / supported". It reveals initiative and follow-through in a single line. Six of the flags, exactly as they appear in the kit:

Red flag

Too many "Maintained, Documented, Supported", too little "Built, Created, Designed"

Indicates they didn't take initiative and just helped others who did

Green flag

Balance between "Built/Created/Designed" and "Maintained/Documented/Supported"

Indicates they know how to take the initiative and finish the job

Red flag

Focus on tools more than actions and results delivered

Indicative of people looking to work with trendy technology rather than quality engineering

Green flag

Focus on actions and results more than tools

Indicative of a person looking for engineering challenges

Red flag

Lots of buzzwords

Indicative of a lack of deep understanding and characterizes Juniors

Green flag

Has Open-Source projects (Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket)

Indicative of a candidate passionate about the field

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02 · The interview

Measure, don't chat.

We stopped opening with "tell me about yourself", and found the one measurement that beats the answer itself:

Measure the answer by the help you gave. When you must help the candidate, the answer is less good. When you must make the question harder, the candidate is better.
  1. 01

    Open with the company, not with them.

    "This is us, this is what we deal with, this is how we do it." It primes the candidate to talk about what is relevant, and saves the first ten minutes for both sides.

  2. 02

    The candidate's CV is a questions bank, and they wrote it.

    If it is on their CV, they better know it. We pick the thing we understand, and we dig until we hit the bottom, or they do.

  3. 03

    Treat the candidate as a consultant.

    We hand them a real problem from our own work and watch them consult: the questions they ask, how they read the situation, the recommendation they can actually reason about.

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03 · The questions

The questions that separate people.

Every question maps to one thing we are trying to see: end-to-end execution, technical depth, architecture, DevOps culture, personality. Each comes with what it examines, the guiding questions, the pitfalls, and what a good answer looks like. One of them, in full:

The question

Build a platform for developers to run scripts

You are a DevOps Engineer in a company with 200 Software Engineers.

You are tasked with building a platform for developers to run scripts.

You can use existing tools, or you can write it on your own.

How would you go about building this platform?

What it examines
  • Ability to ask questions and dig deep. The question is very open, and asking good questions is necessary for making design decisions, understanding trade-offs, and generally understand requirements.
  • Clear thought process. Because the question is very open, and the candidate is being asked to design something new, the ability to communicate ideas clearly and reason about them is critical.
  • Ability to design a system. While the question can go in many different directions, the candidate will always be challenged with making good design decisions, each time taking into account a different aspect of the system.
  • Technical knowledge. The candidate's answer will provide insights into the tools he's familiar with, the languages he's proficient in, the level of details he's able to go into with different technologies. This question should reveal opportunities to ask about specific tech details.
  • Project management (Bonus - More relevant for Leadership positions). The candidate should detail how this system will be built, so listening to his thought process can provide insights into how he manages the project - does he start from the beginning? is the project modular enough to iterate on? etc.
Guiding questions
  • What would be the perfect definition of done for such a project? (metrics, logs, security, scalable, configurable)
  • Where will the scripts' codebase be?
  • Would you place the scripts in a mono-repo or in many different ones?
  • How will the scripts be tested?
  • + 4 more guiding questions and the simplifying variants in the kit
Pitfalls
  • Providing a unified solution for fetching and using credentials
  • Creating a dependency management solution that has conflicts
A good answer
  • Predicts the main challenges and tackles them
  • Is as simple as possible
  • Includes focusing questions by the candidate
  • Is communicated clearly and in a gradual manner
  • Shows proficiency in details of tools/languages
Free PDF. No account.

04 · The philosophy

Know what you are hiring for.

You can't hire for a discipline you can't define. So we defined it, with no buzzwords, in one guide.

Enable the developers to build, improve, and own the system.
  1. 01

    The two things

    Your company needs to be able to do two things: serve its product to customers, and build and improve the product. Everything DevOps does serves one of the two.

  2. 02

    The mission

    Enable the developers to build, improve, and own the system. Everything else is a means to that end.

  3. 03

    The capacity math

    Required DevOps capacity = (Scale x Complexity) / Leverage. It tells you when to hire, when to enable, and when to automate instead.

Free PDF. No account.

The capacity math

How much DevOps capacity do you actually need?

Required capacity = (Scale x Complexity) / Leverage. Four answers and the kit's own formula tells you whether to automate, hire fractional, hire full-time, or build a team.

Kubernetes in production
On-call reality
Michael Zion and Arthur, the MeteorOps co-founders

Who wrote this

From the people who ran the 14,285.

We built MeteorOps by hiring senior DevOps engineers for our own team, then for our clients. The kit is the system we used, written down as we went: what we look for in a CV, how we run the interview, what a good answer sounds like.

It is free because most teams should hire on their own, and the ones who should not will know it by chapter four.

Michael Zion · Co-founder, MeteorOps

Why it is free

We sell the implementation, not the knowledge.

Some teams should hire on their own, and the kit gets them there faster. Others are better off with the shortcut: a company that already has strong senior DevOps engineers ready to go. That is what MeteorOps does, in two shapes.

An embedded senior engineer

A Senior DevOps Engineer joins your team and works in your tools, backed by the wider MeteorOps bench. For steady, embedded capacity every month.

A defined outcome

A senior pod owns a scoped deliverable end to end and drives it to done. For when you have a clear outcome and want a budget guardrail.

Questions

The things people ask before they type their email.

01

Is it really free?

Yes. The PDF, the two scorecards, and the interactive kit online. No card, no trial, and no sales call unless you book one.
02

Can I share it with my team?

Please do. Forward the PDF to whoever reads CVs first and whoever sits in the interview; the scorecards are built for two people to compare notes.
03

Is this for CTOs or for recruiters?

Both. The screen chapter is for whoever reads CVs first; the interview chapters are for whoever sits in the room. The scorecards let the two agree on a number.
04

I am not hiring right now. Is it still useful?

The last chapter answers what DevOps is, what your team needs from it, and when to hire versus automate. Most readers start there.
05

Why give the system away?

Some teams should hire on their own, and the kit gets them there faster. Others are better off with a senior who is ready now. We are the second option, and the kit tells you honestly which one you are.

Is the kit really free?

Yes.

In your inbox in about 60 seconds.

13 flags. 5 guides. 5 questions. 24 answers. Two scorecards. No account.