Technical Skills and Tools Questions

A concise but comprehensive presentation of a candidate's core technical competencies, tool familiarity, and practical proficiency. Topics to cover include programming languages and skill levels, frameworks and libraries, development tools and debuggers, relational and non relational databases, cloud platforms, containerization and orchestration, continuous integration and continuous deployment practices, business intelligence and analytics tools, data analysis libraries and machine learning toolkits, embedded systems and microcontroller experience, and any domain specific tooling. Candidates should communicate both breadth and depth: identify primary strengths, describe representative tasks they can perform independently, and call out areas of emerging competence. Provide brief concrete examples of projects or analyses where specific tools and technologies were applied and quantify outcomes or impact when possible, while avoiding long project storytelling. Prepare a two to three minute verbal summary that links skills and tools to concrete outcomes, and be ready for follow up probes about technical decisions, trade offs, and how tools were used to deliver results.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design a secure, audited secrets management solution for a multi-cloud deployment that supports automatic rotation, least-privilege access, emergency revocation, migration from plaintext secrets, and low-latency retrieval for applications. Compare HashiCorp Vault vs cloud-native KMS+Secrets Manager approaches, discuss HA and DR, and describe audit and compliance reporting you would implement.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Describe the minimal Kubernetes manifest set you would create to deploy a stateless web application. Include specific fields you would set in: Deployment (replicas, resource requests/limits, liveness/readiness probes, rollingUpdate strategy), Service (ClusterIP/LoadBalancer selection), ConfigMap/Secret usage, and how you'd test the deployment in staging before production. Explain briefly why each part matters for reliability.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

List the programming languages you are comfortable writing production code in. For each language provide: a self-rated proficiency level (novice/competent/advanced/expert), two concrete SRE-specific tasks you can perform independently (for example: build a CLI, write Terraform provider, implement a Kubernetes operator, optimize an algorithm), and one limitation or area you are actively improving.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Explain how to perform a canary deployment on Kubernetes using Istio (or another service mesh). Describe required Kubernetes and mesh objects (VirtualService, DestinationRule), how to incrementally shift traffic, what success metrics to monitor, and how to automate rollback when metrics degrade during canary.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Given a service with a 30-day availability SLO of 99.95%, design an alerting policy based on error-budget burn rate. Show: how to calculate the error budget (seconds or requests allowed to fail), the burn-rate thresholds used to trigger warning and page alerts, and what automated or human actions you would recommend at each level.

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