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.

MediumTechnical

30 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.

EasyTechnical

30 practiced

Describe the network troubleshooting process and tools you would use when an application reports increased latency between two services in the same VPC. Include the order you'd run commands (ping, traceroute/mtr, ss/netstat, tcpdump, iperf), what you'd inspect in packet captures, and how you'd minimize capture size and performance impact while still collecting useful evidence.

HardTechnical

28 practiced

A third-party library used by many services introduces a severe memory leak causing production processes to crash. As SRE lead, outline how you would: identify all affected services and versions, quickly mitigate (hotfix, rollback, resource limits), coordinate with engineering teams to patch and test, deploy fixes with minimal disruption, and validate the issue is resolved while handling SLO communication and error budgets.

HardTechnical

25 practiced

Design a highly available storage architecture for Kubernetes workloads requiring RPO <5 minutes and RTO <2 minutes across two regions. Evaluate options: cloud-managed cross-region replication, distributed block storage (e.g., Ceph/Rook), database-level replication, asynchronous object replication, and snapshots. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, latency, performance, and cost, and provide a DR procedure and testing cadence.

HardSystem Design

27 practiced

You are responsible for migrating a large monorepo build system to Bazel to gain reproducible builds and caching. Produce a migration plan: create BUILD files for a small subset, define hermetic toolchains and external dependency handling, integrate remote caching and CI, update developer workflows (local vs remote builds), and outline rollback and success metrics if adoption fails. Address handling language-specific toolchains (Java/Go/Python).

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