Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions

1.1The SRE philosophy - how it differs from traditional operations, and the core tension with velocity

1.2SRE vs DevOps vs platform engineering - the differences and how they co-exist in organisations

1.3The SRE role - toil elimination, reliability work, and how time is divided between ops and engineering

1.4Joining an SRE team - what to learn first and how to add value quickly

2.1SLIs - defining the right service level indicators that measure what users actually care about

2.2SLOs - setting availability, latency, and error rate targets and why the level matters

2.3Error budgets - the concept, how they are calculated, and how teams use them to balance reliability and velocity

2.4SLA vs SLO vs SLI - the legal, operational, and measurement distinction and why they are different

3.1Observability fundamentals - logs, metrics, and traces as the three pillars of system visibility

3.2Monitoring strategy - golden signals, what to instrument, and avoiding alert fatigue

3.3Alert design - actionable alerts, on-call ergonomics, and building a system that pages when it should

3.4Distributed tracing - tracking requests across microservices and using traces to diagnose production issues

4.1Incident response process - detection, declaration, roles, communication, and resolution

4.2On-call culture - sustainable rotations, escalation policies, and managing the human cost of being on-call

4.3Incident communication - status pages, stakeholder updates, and managing the flow of information during an outage

4.4Post-mortems - blameless culture, root cause analysis, action items, and making incidents drive improvement

5.1Capacity planning - demand forecasting, load testing, and provisioning ahead of growth

5.2Performance analysis - profiling, bottleneck identification, and fixing the causes of slow services

5.3Load and stress testing - designing tests, interpreting results, and using them to size infrastructure

5.4Resource efficiency - right-sizing, autoscaling, and optimising the cost of running reliable services

6.1Fault tolerance patterns - circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, and bulkheads in distributed systems

6.2Redundancy and failover - active-active, active-passive, and designing systems that survive component failure

6.3Graceful degradation - designing services that degrade usefully rather than failing completely

6.4Data reliability - backup strategies, replication, and ensuring data integrity under failure conditions

7.1Defining toil - what it is, why it matters, and how SREs measure and limit it

7.2Automation strategy - identifying the highest-value toil to eliminate and building the case for investment

7.3Runbook automation - turning manual operational procedures into automated, reliable scripts

7.4Self-healing systems - building automation that detects and resolves common failures without human intervention

8.1Infrastructure as code for SREs - managing infrastructure reliably at scale

8.2Kubernetes operations - managing clusters in production, upgrades, and dealing with workload failures

8.3Container platform reliability - image scanning, resource limits, and ensuring containers behave predictably

8.4Cloud platform operations - the SRE role in managing cloud infrastructure safely and cost-effectively

9.1Chaos engineering principles - the scientific approach to resilience testing in production

9.2Designing chaos experiments - hypothesis formation, blast radius control, and measuring impact

9.3Running game days - planned resilience tests that reveal weaknesses before incidents do

9.4Building a chaos engineering practice - from ad hoc testing to a systematic reliability programme

10.1Technical questions - SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident management, and reliability patterns

10.2System design questions - designing a highly available service or a monitoring architecture under interview conditions

10.3Scenario questions - how you would handle a major outage, a runaway toil situation, or a reliability regression

10.4Salary negotiation for SRE roles, evaluating the SRE maturity of an organisation, and questions that reveal the real reliability culture