7 top Site Reliability Engineer SRE job interview questions

Our products help software companies – thereby empowering businesses and individuals to . Is a unique place to work and offers competitive compensation packages that include medical, dental, and vision benefits with flexible PTO and a 401k with company-matched contributions [up to X%]. Configuration management has become widely available thanks to second-generation systems. Chef and Puppet are examples of systems that operate in independent mode, but are typically set up in agent/master mode, where the latter passes settings to the concerned agents. One of the earliest generations of contemporary business configuration management technologies was CFEngine. Software programs known as configuration management systems enable the consistent, dependable, and secure control of an environment.

Site Reliability Engineer combines software engineering with IT to create highly reliable systems. SREs are responsible for the reliability of the full stack, from the front-end, customer-facing applications to the back-end database and hardware infrastructure. To understand the engineer’s thoughts on how new technologies might impact the future of reliability engineering. There are many factors that can affect the reliability of a system, so it is important for reliability engineers to prioritize their activities.

Step 3 – Practice a mock interview for 45mins, and get feedback for 15mins.

Before your interview, make a list of all of your skills and experiences that relate to this job. Focus on highlighting the most relevant ones while also including any additional skills that might be helpful in the role. This question can help the interviewer understand your level of experience with disaster recovery plans and how you decide when to use them. Use examples from past experiences to explain when you would escalate a problem to the level of a disaster recovery plan, and what steps you would take in that situation.

Site Reliability Engineer questions

So when it was time to create a formal team to do this operational work, it was natural to take the “everything can be treated as a software problem” approach and run with it. The most noticeable feature the DevOps team performs is producing applications and various other software programs utilized in the company’s IT framework. Nonetheless, they must do numerous other activities to be effective. A DevOps group must also function as an expert to the company, advising adjustments, upgrades, and different services to the business’s technology challenges. I acknowledge that I will undoubtedly deal with people and teams from beyond my organization and with whom I have no direct authority. I have established and refined my communication skills to collaborate with these people to attain the usual objectives.

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SRE teams are often tasked with conducting blameless post-incident reviews that uncover problems in the system. Not focusing on post-incident reviews or not conducting them thoroughly can lead to less reliability and a lack of incident preparedness. They can spend them on developers or they can spend them on SRE. In theory, they will spend only as much on SRE as is necessary to get the optimal feature velocity while meeting their service SLO. In fact, that’s actually how many we want them to spend on SRE — no more, no less. So that’s an incentive for them to be frugal with their SREs, and also be careful about the code that their teams write so that it doesn’t generate a lot of work that SRE teams need to deal with.

Hiring a site reliability engineer interview coach usually gives extremely high ROI. A typical scenario on our platform is a candidate spending $500 on interview coaching, landing the offer, and enjoying a ~$30,000 increase in salary conditions as a result. You can read success stories from candidates who have worked with us in the past.

Can you talk about some more classic conflicts in operational and development groups?

Site reliability engineering involves ensuring the availability, latency, performance, capacity, scalability and deployment of software systems by the engineers themselves. The OpenStack cloud computing platform is a popular tool among site reliability engineers. Employers ask this question to make sure you have the necessary skills to be successful in their company. If you have experience using OpenStack, share what you’ve done with it. Unsurprisingly, SRE interview questions often involve workflow and process automation. A Site reliability engineer interview coach will improve your interview performance and increase your chances of getting an offer.

Site Reliability Engineer questions

If one element is off schedule, it can be difficult to identify, solve, and fix issues, and ultimately meet implementation dates. How they answer the question will indicate the candidate’s ability to solve a problem to meet a deadline. Site Reliability Engineering is the outcome of combining IT operations responsibilities with software development.

What makes you qualified for this job?

The interviewer is likely asking this question in order to gauge the applicant’s interest in the field and to see if they have the necessary skills and knowledge for the position. It is important for the interviewer to know if the applicant is truly interested in the field and if they would be a good fit for the company. An SRE is focused on managing the system engineer roles belonging to core infrastructure and is more inclined and applicable for the production environment. Ultimately, they both reduce the gap between the two teams’ development and operations. Bear in mind that these questions provide a guide and structure around which interviewees can educate themselves.

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We realize that SRE candidates are also likely to read this article. However, we are not providing a candidate cheat sheet, but rather a resource for those doing the hiring. Candidates would be better served focusing on our article, How to Become a Top-Notch Site Reliability Engineer. If you have the experience and the skills, answering the questions will be easy.

Mock Interviews

SREs facilitate collaboration and help resolve potential conflicts between teams or silos. SRE interviews might touch on personnel management, conflict resolution and other HR https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/sre-site-reliability-engineer/ issues. While some organizations see uptime and downtime as a performance metric, perceiving potential downtime as an error budget enables technology teams to take risks.

  • A bottleneck is a system restriction that causes a decrease in productivity.
  • This is important because it allows the interviewer to see if the candidate is a good fit for the company.
  • Questions may range from explaining how to secure a container image, the difference between RAID 0 versus RAID 5, and when to use them.
  • Several nodes accessing a web resource can use the same snat.
  • If their answer is “I wrote three functions last month,” well, you have your answer.
  • We’ve held that hiring bar constant through the years, even at times when it’s been very hard to find people, and there’s been a lot of pressure to relax that bar in order to increase hiring volume.

We can then create VG0 out of PE1 and PE2, and VG1 out of PE3 and PE4. After that we can create a LV called /root and another one called swap on VG0. Refresh is the amount of time a slave DNS server should wait before pulling from the master. The setsid() call is used to detach the process from the parent .