Site Reliability Engineer
Practise SRE skills: SLOs and error budgets, monitoring, alerting, incident response, capacity planning and building systems that stay up under load.
- Questions
- 100
- Interview Qs
- 30
- Judged problems
- 42
- Skills
- 9
About the role
A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) uses software engineering to run production systems. Instead of fixing the same problems by hand again and again, an SRE writes code and automation so that services stay reliable, fast and easy to operate as they grow. The goal is not 100% uptime, but the right level of reliability for users, measured with SLIs and SLOs.
Day to day, an SRE defines and tracks service level objectives, builds dashboards and alerts, takes part in on-call rotations, leads or supports incident response and writes blameless postmortems. They also review new designs for reliability risks, plan capacity, tune Linux and Kubernetes workloads, and remove toil through automation.
SREs work closely with developers. The error budget gives both teams a shared, data-driven way to decide when to ship new features and when to slow down and invest in stability. Strong SREs understand distributed systems failure modes such as retry storms, cascading failures and tail latency, and they design guard rails like circuit breakers, load shedding and safe rollouts.
Practise by level
Open the full question bank (100 questions) →Mock interview
Screening round
4 questions · 4 min each · pass 50%
mediumTechnical round
5 questions · 4 min each · pass 60%
hardFinal round
6 questions · 3 min each · pass 70%
Coding problems for site reliability engineers
- Exponential Backoff Timelineeasy
- First Failing Buildeasy
- How Much Error Budget Is Left?easy
- Is There a Corridor Route?easy
- Latency Percentileseasy
- Longest Run of Oneseasy
- Parse an Access Log Lineeasy
- Sensor Moving Averageeasy
- Sum of Prices in a Rangeeasy
- Combine Overlapping Rangesmedium
- Count Subarrays With a Given Summedium
- CPU Jobs with Cooldownmedium
Skills in this track
Learning roadmap
- 1
Linux, networking and scripting
Get comfortable with the Linux shell, processes, memory, disks, systemd and logs. Learn TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP and TLS basics. Write small automation scripts in Bash and Python or Go.
- 2
Containers, Kubernetes and the cloud
Learn Docker images and containers, then Kubernetes objects such as Deployments, Services, probes, resource requests and limits. Understand how a cloud provider runs compute, load balancers and managed databases.
- 3
Monitoring and observability
Learn metrics, logs and traces. Run Prometheus and Grafana, write PromQL, use histograms for latency and understand the four golden signals and the USE and RED methods. Try OpenTelemetry for tracing.
- 4
SLOs, alerting and on-call
Define SLIs and SLOs for a real service, calculate error budgets and build multi-window burn-rate alerts. Practise writing runbooks and keep alerts actionable to avoid alert fatigue.
- 5
Incidents and reliability patterns
Practise incident roles, communication and blameless postmortems. Study timeouts, retries with backoff and jitter, circuit breakers, load shedding, graceful degradation and safe rollouts like canaries.
- 6
Scale and resilience engineering
Learn capacity planning, load testing, tail latency, multi-region design and chaos engineering. Automate away toil and contribute reliability reviews to new system designs.
Top Site Reliability Engineer interview questions
- Explain the difference between an SLI, an SLO and an SLA, with an example.
- What is an error budget and how does a team use it?
- What are the four golden signals, and why are they useful for monitoring?
- You are on call and get paged for a high error rate. What are your first steps?
- What is toil, and how would you reduce it on your team?
- What is the difference between monitoring and observability, and what are metrics, logs and traces each good for?