Technical Foundation and Self Assessment Questions

Covers baseline technical knowledge and the candidate's ability to honestly assess and communicate their technical strengths and weaknesses. Topics include fundamental infrastructure and networking concepts, operating system and protocol basics, core development and platform concepts relevant to the role, and the candidate's candid self evaluation of their depth in specific technologies. Interviewers use this to calibrate how technical the candidate is expected to be, identify areas for growth, and ensure alignment of expectations between product and engineering for collaboration.

MediumTechnical

47 practiced

You must perform capacity planning for a new service expected to serve 1M daily active users with average of 5 requests per user during peak hour. Describe the calculations, assumptions, safety margins, and experiments you would run to validate capacity estimates.

HardSystem Design

72 practiced

Discuss trade-offs between strong consistency and eventual consistency for a user-facing profile service that supports reads and writes. Design a hybrid approach that minimizes user-visible anomalies while maintaining acceptable latency and availability.

MediumSystem Design

49 practiced

Provide a concise plan to migrate a legacy monolith into containers and an orchestration platform. Highlight key SRE concerns: observability, configuration and secret management, deployment strategy, and rollback plans to preserve availability during migration.

HardSystem Design

47 practiced

Design an SLO strategy for a multi-region service where user requests are routed to local regions but failover to remote regions is possible. Describe how to define SLOs, allocate error budgets per region, and handle cross-region failures without violating global SLOs.

EasyTechnical

46 practiced

Explain the key differences between TCP and UDP. For each protocol describe reliability guarantees, connection model, ordering, congestion control, typical production use cases, and one scenario where an SRE would prefer UDP over TCP. Include monitoring signals you would watch for each.

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