Understanding of Specific Team/Organization Challenges Questions
At Staff level, you should have done homework on the team and organization. Familiarity with their scale, tech stack, known challenges. Ability to speak to how your experience prepares you for specific problems they face.
HardSystem Design
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Design a 12-month SRE roadmap for a mid-size SaaS company you researched: 250 engineers, 150 services, Kubernetes + Postgres, multi-region, 99.95% monthly availability target. Provide SLO tiers, error budget policies, core projects, staffing/training plan, and measurable success metrics for each quarter.
MediumTechnical
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The team uses 30-minute on-call handoffs across time zones. Propose a concrete on-call rotation and handoff protocol to reduce context loss, ensure continuity, and minimize burnout. Include tooling, runbook practices, and overlap design.
EasyBehavioral
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Before joining a new SRE team, what specific research steps and sources do you perform to understand the team's scale, tech stack, known incidents, and organizational priorities? Mention concrete sources (e.g., GitHub, architecture docs, incident reports, LinkedIn, public blog) and what signals you extract from each to form initial hypotheses.
HardTechnical
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Create a realistic game-day (incident simulation) tailored to the company's most likely failure modes (for example: DB failover, third-party auth outage). Provide objectives, roles/participants, a scenario script, measurable outcomes, and the post-exercise action plan.
EasyBehavioral
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Tell me about a time you convinced a skeptical product manager to prioritize reliability work over a new feature. Use STAR: situation, task, action, result. Highlight how you built credibility and measured impact after delivery.
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