Frame infrastructure debt in business terms: "Our deployment takes 45 minutes, costing us 20 engineer-hours per week. Investing 2 weeks in modernisation saves 1,000 hours per year."
Look for: tracking infrastructure debt visibly, quantifying its impact (incident frequency, deployment time, developer productivity), making a business case for modernisation, incremental migration strategies, and balancing reliability investment with business needs. Best candidates make infrastructure health visible to leadership with clear metrics.
Tests strategic communication skills. Many DevOps engineers struggle to justify infrastructure investment to non-technical leaders. Those who can make the business case clearly are far more effective.