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Site Reliability Engineering Motivation Questions

Prepare a concise, personal narrative explaining why you are interested in site reliability engineering specifically and why this particular role and company appeal to you. Cover what aspects of reliability engineering excite you such as building resilient systems, automating operations, incident response, capacity planning, observability, and reliability culture. Explain how your background prepared you for this work by citing relevant projects, troubleshooting or debugging experiences, internships, infrastructure or backend work, tools and technologies you used, and concrete incidents you helped resolve. For senior or staff level candidates, describe your vision for reliability engineering, specific technical challenges you want to tackle, how you would influence reliability practices, and how this role fits your career trajectory. For entry level candidates, be authentic about current skills and emphasize learning mindset and relevant coursework or hands on practice. Demonstrate knowledge of the company by referencing its technology, known infrastructure challenges, or reliability initiatives and align your motivations and goals with the team mission and role expectations.

HardTechnical
0 practiced
You inherit a service with chronic incidents, unclear ownership, and no runbooks. Create a triage plan to stabilize the service, assign ownership, and produce a roadmap from quick mitigations to long-term fixes with milestones and owners.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Tell me about an on-call incident you responded to. Describe the timeline, your role, initial triage steps, how you communicated with stakeholders, and what you did to restore service and prevent recurrence.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
For a mid-level SRE candidate: describe a project where you reduced operational toil by at least 30%. Include the initial manual steps, your automation approach, how you measured the reduction, and how you validated reliability improvements.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You are tasked with capacity planning for a service expected to grow 10x over the next 12 months. Which data sources, growth models, and safety margins would you use? Describe the concrete steps and stakeholders you'd involve.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
How would you design an observability platform that supports efficient long-term metric/log/trace retention, query performance, and cost control for thousands of services? Cover storage, sampling, indexing, and alerting architecture at a high level.

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