SRE Interview Questions
34 questions across 3 categories
Site Reliability Engineering questions on SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and the observability practices that define the discipline.
A single catastrophic incident burns an entire quarter's error budget in one day. Does the error budget policy still apply the same way?
AdvancedSRE7 min
How would you choose the rolling window length for an error budget — 7 days, 30 days, or 90 days — and what does that choice actually trade off?
IntermediateSRE6 min
How would you go about setting an SLO and error budget for a service that's never had one, and what should actually happen once that error budget runs out?
IntermediateSRE9 min
How do you handle a service with multiple different user-facing SLIs — latency, availability, correctness — that might have conflicting error budget states at the same time?
AdvancedSRE7 min
Your on-call engineers are getting paged 15+ times a week, and they've started treating every page as probably-not-urgent before even looking. How do you fix this?
AdvancedSRE8 min
How can a postmortem process be genuinely blameless while still holding people accountable for mistakes? Doesn't 'blameless' just mean nobody's responsible for anything?
IntermediateSRE7 min
How would you design an incident commander role/process for a company that currently has no formal structure — incidents are just 'whoever notices it first tries to fix it'?
IntermediateSRE7 min
One engineer on your team has quietly been covering far more on-call shifts than everyone else because they're 'just better at it' and others avoid volunteering. How do you fix this before it causes burnout?
IntermediateSRE6 min
Your team resolves most incidents quickly because a few senior engineers just 'know' what to do. What's actually wrong with that, and how would you convert that knowledge into runbooks without slowing the seniors down?
IntermediateSRE6 min
Your SRE team spends most of its time on manual, repetitive operational work and has no time left for the reliability engineering they were hired to do. How would you identify and reduce this 'toil' systematically?
IntermediateSRE7 min