Discuss how you handle state - remote backends, locking, and drift detection. This is where IaC gets real.
Look for: understanding of declarative vs imperative approaches, experience with Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or Ansible, state management strategies (remote state, locking), module reuse and DRY principles, code review for infra changes, and drift detection. Best candidates discuss testing infrastructure code.
Fundamental DevOps skill. Candidates who only use click-ops or scripts are not truly practicing IaC. Ask about handling secrets in IaC code and managing environment differences.