Interview
Questions

Walk me through a significant production incident you have responded to. What was your role, how did you troubleshoot, and what was the outcome?

How do you approach postmortems after incidents? Describe a time you led or contributed to a postmortem that resulted in meaningful improvements.

How have you used SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets in your work? Tell me about a time these metrics influenced an important decision.

SREs aim to eliminate toil through automation. Tell me about a repetitive operational task you automated. What was the impact on your team?

How do you design effective monitoring and alerting? Describe a situation where you improved a system's observability or reduced alert fatigue.

Being on-call can be stressful. How do you manage on-call responsibilities while maintaining work-life balance? Describe a challenging on-call situation you handled.

Tell me about your experience with Infrastructure as Code. How have you used tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to manage infrastructure at scale?

SRE requires close collaboration with development teams. Describe a time you worked with developers to improve the reliability or operability of their service.

Tell me about your experience with capacity planning. How do you forecast growth and ensure systems can handle increased load?

Describe your experience building or improving CI/CD pipelines. How do you balance deployment speed with safety and reliability?

How do you approach change management in production environments? Tell me about a risky change you implemented and how you mitigated the risk.

How do you balance reliability work against product feature development? Describe a time you had to push back on releasing features due to reliability concerns.

Tell me about your experience with disaster recovery planning and testing. Have you ever had to execute a DR plan for real? What did you learn?

How do you incorporate security into your operations work? Describe a time you identified and addressed a security vulnerability in infrastructure or deployment processes.

What draws you to SRE or DevOps work specifically? What do you find most rewarding about keeping systems reliable and helping teams ship faster?