Site Reliability Engineering Career Trajectory and Goals Questions

Prepare to tell a cohesive, personal story that combines your historical progression in Site Reliability Engineering and your future ambitions in the discipline. For past progression, highlight role titles and dates, key inflection points, major projects and systems you owned, measurable impact and outcomes, examples of technical depth such as automation or capacity planning, leadership and mentoring experiences, and how your responsibilities moved from reactive incident response to proactive architecture and strategy. For future goals, articulate what draws you to Site Reliability Engineering, the kinds of problems you want to focus on such as large scale systems, reliability engineering, automation and toil reduction, observability, or platform design, and a realistic three to five year roadmap for growth (for example technical expert, principal engineer, platform owner, or manager). Be ready to connect past decisions and learning to your future plan, explain tradeoffs you anticipate, and show passion for the craft beyond obtaining a role. Use concrete examples, metrics, timelines, and lessons learned to make both the journey and the goals believable and actionable.

HardSystem Design

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You are asked to build the SRE function from scratch for a startup moving from a monolith to microservices. Outline an 18-month plan covering organization structure, initial hires, tooling choices, process (on-call, SLOs, postmortems), and how you will measure ROI and evolve the team from reactive to proactive work.

MediumTechnical

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Design a realistic three-year SRE growth roadmap for yourself to move from a mid-level SRE to a staff or principal role. Include measurable milestones (technical ownership, cross-team influence, program leadership), approximate timelines, skills to acquire, representative projects, and metrics you would use to judge progress.

EasyBehavioral

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What does MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery) mean to you in the context of SRE? Describe a concrete action you took at a previous job that reduced MTTR, include the baseline and improved MTTR numbers if available, and explain how you measured and sustained that improvement.

HardBehavioral

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Reflect on three career decisions that significantly shaped your SRE trajectory, such as job changes, major project selections, or hiring/mentoring choices. For each decision explain the context, alternatives you considered, why you chose that path, the outcomes (measurable when possible), and what you would change in hindsight.

MediumTechnical

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Describe a capacity planning project you led. Explain the inputs you used (traffic forecasts, growth curves, historical peaks), the models or formulas relied upon, validation methods for assumptions, the changes you recommended (scaling rules, architectural changes, purchase decisions), and the measurable outcomes achieved (cost, headroom, incident reduction).

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