Hey, it’s Lefteris 👋 I’m the voice behind the weekly newsletter “The Cloud Engineers.”
If you’ve ever walked out of a cloud engineering interview thinking “I answered everything correctly… so why didn’t I get the offer?” then this article is for you.
Over the past few months, I spoke with 20 hiring managers across startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises who regularly interview for Cloud Engineer, DevOps, SRE, and Solutions Architect roles. I asked them a simple question: “When two candidates have the same technical skills, what makes you say yes to one and no to the other?”
The answers were remarkably consistent. And almost none of them were about knowing more AWS services.
Here’s what they’re actually looking for.
The #1 theme: candidates who tell stories, not spec sheets
Nineteen of the twenty managers used some version of the same phrase: “I want to understand how they think.”
The weake…
