Site Reliability Engineering Fundamentals Questions

Covers foundational site reliability engineering concepts that interviewers expect all candidates to understand. Topics include Service Level Objectives and Service Level Indicators and how they relate to availability targets and measurable system health, the notion of error budgets and trade offs between velocity and reliability, incident management including detection, escalation, on call rotations, and blameless postmortems, the importance of monitoring and observability for alerting and root cause analysis, basic deployment and rollback strategies, and an automation mindset to reduce toil. Candidates should be able to explain these ideas at a conceptual level, discuss how they influence decision making, and reference common practices used to improve reliability.

HardSystem Design

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Design an automated canary analysis pipeline. Describe components: deployment orchestration, traffic split, metric collection, statistical tests (e.g., t-test, Mann-Whitney, Bayesian), decision logic for pass/fail, and automated rollback. Explain how you avoid false positives in noisy metrics.

MediumTechnical

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Design a small set of chaos experiments or resiliency tests to validate that a service meets its SLOs. Include at least three experiments (e.g., instance termination, increased error rates on a downstream, network partition) and explain success criteria and rollback conditions.

MediumTechnical

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Your CI pipeline has flaky integration tests causing false alerts and wasted engineering time. Outline a strategy to triage and remediate flaky tests: detection, quarantining, root cause analysis, and long-term fixes. Include metrics to track progress.

EasyTechnical

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Describe common deployment rollback strategies (immediate full rollback, progressive rollback during canary, and using feature flags). For each strategy, state the pros/cons and give an example scenario where that rollback method is preferable.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Architect a scalable SLO/platform for an organization that manages hundreds of services. Describe ingestion of SLIs (pull vs push), storage (time-series constraints), computation cadence for rolling windows, UI/alerting integration, and how to support service-level SLOs and composite SLOs.

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