If you are preparing for a tech interview, check out our technical interview checklist, interview questions page, and salary negotiation ebook to get interview-ready! Also, read Google Interview Questions, How hard it is to get a job at Google? And How to prepare for Google Coding Challenge for specific insights and guidance on Google tech interviews. This article is specifically intended for engineering managers and leaders working with Site Reliability Engineering teams. We begin with an example SRE job description that you can copy, paste, and edit for your specific location and needs.

This is part of the service level arrangement, which is a run-down neighborhood. Usual standards used to establish the SLO include response time, throughput, frequency, and other service delivery metrics. I demand extremely details SLOs when initially scoping and intending a job. One should invest 70% of their interview preparation time on solving coding problems, 25% on system design questions, and the remaining 5% on other personality-based parameters. The SRE team appoints software engineers, software developers, and coding engineers who are comfortable with coding. It’s important to be well-versed with coding and scripting knowledge to understand the operational framework and infrastructural issues.

Can you explain what data reliability engineering is and why it’s vital to an organization?

This is important because it shows that the interviewer is looking for a candidate who is able to think critically about the role of management in reliability engineering. Second, it allows the interviewer to gauge the candidate’s level of experience and knowledge in this area. This is important because it allows the interviewer to determine whether or not the candidate is qualified https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/sre-site-reliability-engineer/ for the position. Finally, it gives the interviewer an opportunity to get to know the candidate on a personal level. This is important because it allows the interviewer to see if the candidate is a good fit for the company. Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series is a collection of contributed articles written by industry experts in enterprise software categories.

• From coding to automation, SRE skills reach far and wide A site reliability engineer wears many hats.
• There are a few potential reasons why an interviewer might ask a reliability engineer about their thoughts on the role of statistics in reliability engineering.
• Expire is how long a secondary server will keep trying to get a zone from the master.
• Some organizations will have dedicated DevOps teams, whereas others follow DevOps methodologies.
• There were a few behavioral questions, I asked a few questions to him about the job profile and the interview was over.
• Thus, an SRE is not a dedicated developer, but a specialized player within DevOps groups.

Roughly, that’s the equation that has helped SRE demand stay high. That demand in turn being higher than supply has helped us avoid being pulled into some engagements where the engagement itself would have been sketchy. “Typically, we hire about a mix of people who have more of a software background and people who have more of a systems background. It seems to be a really good mix.” When asked to select between creating new attributes or paying down technological financial obligations, my initial method is to consider the metrics and see which activities will give the better ROI. This objective evaluation is simple to finish when the right metrics are readily available. However, my experience has taught me to examine this issue subjectively to determine which effort would undoubtedly generate the best outcomes, result in future growth, and keep the DevOps group engaged.

Salesforce DevOps Trends 2021

SRE is a specialized IT role that involves the automation of operations tasks. The role can be a good fit for systems engineers looking to improve programming skills, as well as developers seeking to manage large-scale infrastructures. Candidates with demonstrated strength in IT systems, software development, automation and a broad cross-section of related tools have a competitive advantage during the interview. The goal of these questions is to help gauge a candidate’s knowledge, experience, and ability to interact with the interviewer while answering with technical competence and clarity. Yes, the typical site reliability engineer interview process does involve one or more coding interviews. You’ll need to be confident using algorithms and data structures to solve complex problems, while sharing your thought process with the interviewer.

Therefore, the candidates should define the SLO and share an example of SLO and how it helps the teams and customers. This question determines your ability to analyze your deployment pipeline and make intelligent decisions for changing it. You can showcase how in your experience, you, alongside your team, brought significant improvements to resilience without drastically affecting employee productivity to highlight your problem-solving skills. SREs write and deploy code to improve the resilience of applications and infrastructure.

We want to improve our system deployment processes. What is your approach to doing so?

They need to maintain smooth relationships between inter and intra departments and identify bottlenecks in productivity. With this question, the hiring manager is trying to determine how you would work collaboratively with different teams and solve issues between cross-functional teams. A Site Reliability Engineer applicant must practice as many coding problems related to the data structure, algorithm, and system design as possible. Therefore, strengthening coding fundamentals by practicing is an essential part of SRE interview preparation.

With SRE there is an inherent expectation of responsibility for meeting the service-level objectives set for the service they manage and the service-level agreements we promise in our contracts. Common answers are “using someone else’s computer” or running services on equipment in someone else’s data center. Follow up with a question about why companies use any of the various cloud platforms (save money, offload maintenance, etc.).

SRE interview process

This article will help you understand the Google Site Reliability Engineer Interview process and craft the perfect preparation plan to help you become the next Google Site Reliability Engineer. There is a mysterious process running on the server, which is generating a secret message. The kernel will then start init, which is the very first process, usually having PID 1. Init will look at /etc/inittab and will switch to the default run-level which on Linux servers tends to be 3. An advantage of using LVM is that we can create ‘software’ RAID, i.e., we can join multiple disks into one bigger disk. We cannot select the RAID level with LVM, for instance we cannot say that a VG is of RAID 5 type, however we are able to pick and chose the different PE’s we want in a VG.

See how you can harness chaos to build resilient systems by requesting a demo of Gremlin. Wondering about the average Site Reliability Engineer salary? Or how much top-notch SREs at best-in-class organizations are compensated? Are they different or just different names for the same thing? This article explores that question in depth by delving into each and then comparing them. You want to learn about how the candidate thinks about interacting with coworkers to gauge how those thoughts fit with your company’s current culture as well as the culture you want in the future.

If someone is looking to improve algorithm or interview skills, they should definitely consider using Interview Kickstart. Read articles, books, and watch videos related to Google Site Reliability Engineer interview preparation to plan your schedule. The Google Site Reliability Engineer team is renowned for identifying loopholes and suggesting improvements without impacting employee productivity.

Be prepared for an array of questions on infrastructure and operations. Questions may range from explaining how to secure a container image, the difference between RAID 0 versus RAID 5, and when to use them. Other questions might involve the difference between a service level agreement and service level indicator or between virtualization, containers, and Kubernetes. Infrastructure questions generally become complex and may focus on scalability and IT infrastructure to gauge the candidate’s expertise. The site Reliability Engineer acts as a bridge between development and operations teams.