Site Reliability Engineer Interview Experiences & Questions
10 real Site Reliability Engineer interviews from 5 companies: what each round covers, the exact questions, and who got the offer.
What to expect · Site Reliability Engineer
Based on 10 real interviews
Site Reliability Engineer interviews by company
The Site Reliability Engineer interview process
Most common round types: Coding (6), Behavioral (5), System Design (4), Technical (3), Concept (1), Cross-Functional (1).
Real Site Reliability Engineer interview questions
- What are you most proud of in your career?
- Can you walk me through your current role, core responsibilities, and why you want the Google SRE role?
- Given an input file, parse it, do the required mathematical calculation, and return the result.
- What happens when you type a URL into a browser?
- A production service started showing errors and timeouts after a deployment. How would you troubleshoot it?
- Given a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), write a function to return the length of the longest path.
- Talk me through your work experience in the past year.
- Tell me about a project where you had a strong opinion but the team did not initially accept it. How did you handle that?
- Write a script to ping hosts, identify the slow ones, and then loop through those hosts to print specific data.
- Explain networking protocols like QUIC and why they matter.
- Behavioral questions
- Tell me about a time you had to work with a coworker who was difficult or not cooperative.
- Explain signals, signal handling, and signal masking.
- Design a task scheduler in Python.
- Why do you want to work at Apple?
- What is the difference between background and foreground processes?
- How will you set goals for your teams?
- work experience
- What is the difference between hard links and soft links, and what are the tradeoffs?
- Details about the roles
- What trade‑offs have you made between reliability and feature velocity?
- Move all zeros to the end of an array.
- Question based on Resume and experience
- Tell me about yourself.
- Given an array of task durations (in minutes), return the pairs of tasks that can be completed within 60 minutes. For example, for [1, 43, 20, 59, 30, 30], return [[0, 3], [4, 5]].
- Leetcode style question, System Design, Linux and networking deep dive
- What are your interview preferences and logistics?
- Snapshot Array
- Leadership round
- What is a fork, process, thread?
- Question on reading an excel file
- What are you looking for in your next opportunity?
- Debugging round of a database inode issue
- Explained the interview process
- Design a system to push updated packages onto a cluster.
- What is a Zombie process?
- What happens when a System is crashed? How do you investigate?
- What happens when you type www.apple.com
- Write a bash script to update 1000 servers
- How do you fix CI/CD isses
Latest Site Reliability Engineer interview experiences
“I would say the phone call with recruiter is just discussion on the role and scheduling the coding interview. The coding interview is on hackerrank and 1 - 2 leetcode medium problems.”
“It was smooth I had a python coding interview and then Googlyness questions which were based on projects I have worked so far”
“Very rigorous. Interviewers were in a rush. I believe it’s crucial to get a feel of what you should expect during the interview and what kinds of signals you need to give. So I strongly recommend…”
“The process was smooth. What didn't go well/how to practice better: - grinding to solve problem under 30 minutes”
“Everything was quick; the recruiter was really informative. There is a lot of prep material. Very little technical stuff to deal with. I was also referred to the role so it was a little easier for…”
“What surprised me most was that after typing a simple URL in the browser, they expected me to drive the whole conversation end to end, from DNS and system calls to interrupts and sockets, and then…”
“The bar for leetcode was lower for PE rather SWE, but there was 2 rounds on SRE debugging and Linux debugging.”
“Overall, the interview process was well-structured and professionally organized. It consisted of an initial phone screening, followed by a panel interview with the team lead and two senior members.”
“Overall, the interview process went smoothly. The interviews were well organized, and I was able to assess the candidate’s technical skills and problem-solving approach. What went well: The…”
“I was not interested to proceed with futher interview rounds since I got promoted in my current role”
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are in the Site Reliability Engineer interview?
Candidates report a typical 2.5 rounds, usually including a recruiter screen, online assessment, phone screen, technical round.
How hard is the Site Reliability Engineer interview?
Candidates rate it 3.0/5 on average (medium), across 10 interviews.
How long does the Site Reliability Engineer hiring process take?
About 2 weeks from first contact to decision, based on reported timelines.
What percentage of Site Reliability Engineer candidates get an offer?
20% of candidates with a final result got an offer (1 of 5).
What does the Site Reliability Engineer interview focus on?
The most common round types are Coding, Behavioral, System Design, Technical.