Interview prep

Site Reliability Engineer interview questions

13 questions site reliability engineers get asked, grouped by type. Under each one are the skills it is really testing, so you can pick a story from your own work that shows them.

Technical

  1. How do you decide what reliability target, such as a service level objective, is right for a given service?
    Tests: reliability, system design
  2. Walk me through how you'd run the first ten minutes of a major incident where a core service is down.
    Tests: incident response, communication
  3. How do you run a postmortem after an outage so it leads to real change rather than just a document nobody reads?
    Tests: incident response, process
  4. How do you plan capacity for a service ahead of an expected traffic spike, such as a major launch?
    Tests: capacity planning, reliability

Situational

  1. A team wants to ship a risky change but their error budget is nearly exhausted for the period. How do you handle that conversation?
    Tests: reliability, communication
  2. Your on-call rotation is getting paged constantly for alerts that turn out not to matter. How do you fix that?
    Tests: observability, reliability
  3. You find a single component that, if it failed, would take down a critical path with no fallback. What do you do?
    Tests: system design, reliability
  4. Your team spends a large share of its time on repetitive manual operational work. How do you approach reducing it?
    Tests: process, prioritisation

Behavioral

  1. Tell me about a time you disagreed with a coworker and how you handled it.
    Tests: conflict resolution, communication
  2. Describe a project or task that did not go well and what you did about it.
    Tests: ownership, reflection
  3. Give an example of persuading someone to adopt an idea they initially resisted.
    Tests: influence, communication
  4. Walk me through how you decided what to work on when you had more requests than time.
    Tests: prioritisation, judgment
  5. Tell me about a time you had to learn something new quickly to get a job done.
    Tests: learning agility, ownership
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Site Reliability Engineer interview questions — Gurus Consulting