Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions
Go Back1. Tell me about some of the process improvements you have implemented in the past.
2. What is your strategy for staying up to date with industry trends and resources?
3. How would you describe cloud computing to someone who doesn't have a technical background?
4. What are some of the basic issues a site reliability engineer addresses in their daily activities?
5. What are some of the databases you've used in your previous roles? How do you manage database query times?
6. When analyzing a software development pipeline, how do you identify ways to improve its efficiency?
7. How do you integrate the customer experience into your SRE strategy?
8. Describe to me how you balance the interests of different stakeholders in the organization.
9. How do you establish SLOs and SLIs, and are you open to making adjustments to these when warranted?
10. Walk me through the process of determining if a development team should work on new features or pay down technical debt.
11. What steps have you taken to improve collaboration between operations and IT teams?
12. What are the fundamental stages of DevOps, and what tools do you use for each of these?
13. In your opinion, what are some of the key functions performed by an ideal DevOps team?
14. What are some of the common data structures you work with in this role?
15. What are some of the steps you can take to reduce toil in a process?
16. What is a Linux signal, and what are some common ones you work with?
17. Can you describe the differences between DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering?
18. Can you explain how Service Level Objectives, or SLOs, are used in the work of a site reliability engineer?
19. Tell me about the differences between process and thread in the context of site reliability engineering.
20. What is an Error Budget, and how is it used?
21. Can you describe the three pillars of observability and describe the one you depend on the most?
22. How would you define a service level indicator?
23. What are some of the common Linux kill commands?
24. What is Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, and can you list some of the TCP connection states?
25. Can you define the term 'Inode'?
26. What is a docker container, and how do you secure these?
27. Please discuss hard links and soft links and provide an example of each command.
28. Can you discuss the difference between snat and dnat?
29. What is Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and what is it used for?
30. Can you describe the concept of observability? How would you improve an organizations' systems observability?