Infrastructure Engineer Interview

Hi JB, good luck with the interview. For an IT Infrastructure Engineer first-stage competency interview, they’ll usually want evidence that you can troubleshoot calmly, communicate clearly, prioritise incidents, and work well with users, suppliers and wider IT teams.

I’d focus your preparation around these areas:

• Troubleshooting under pressure, especially outages, performance issues, connectivity problems, server issues or user-impacting incidents.
• Prioritising workload, such as balancing BAU tickets, project work, patching, upgrades and urgent incidents.
• Communication, especially explaining technical issues to non-technical users and keeping stakeholders updated.
• Security and best practice, including patching, access control, backups, monitoring, change control and documentation.
• Teamwork, including working with service desk, network teams, cyber teams, vendors or third parties.
• Service improvement, such as automating a task, improving monitoring, reducing repeat incidents, or updating documentation.

Have 4 or 5 strong STAR examples ready, including:

• A major incident or outage you helped resolve.
• A time you dealt with a difficult user or stakeholder.
• A time you prioritised multiple urgent issues.
• A time you improved a system, process or service.
• A time you made a mistake or spotted a risk and what you learned.

For each answer, make sure you explain the impact: reduced downtime, improved reliability, better user experience, fewer repeat tickets, stronger security, or smoother service delivery.

If you can, post the job description or the technologies listed and  I’ll help you narrow down the most likely competency questions.

Richard