Tell me about your experience running IT operations. What systems were you responsible for?

Note: Operations interviews reward specifics about scale and consequence. "I supported the infrastructure" says nothing; "I was on call for 40 servers supporting 1,200 users, with a four-hour recovery objective" says everything.

Cover:

• The estate. How many servers, users, sites, and applications. On-premises, cloud, or hybrid.
• Your scope. Whether you owned the systems or supported someone who did. Be honest — this is easy to test with follow-up questions.
• The service commitments. Uptime targets, support hours, and recovery objectives. Working to a defined SLA is a different discipline from best-effort support.
• What you improved. Strong candidates: automating a manual build process, introducing monitoring where there was none, cutting ticket volume by fixing a root cause, or completing a migration without downtime.

Numbers matter here more than in most interviews — ticket volume, uptime achieved, time saved.