Your SRE Background and Experience Questions
Articulate your hands-on experience with systems administration, monitoring tools, automation scripts, and any incident response involvement. Be specific about technologies (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform) and concrete examples of what you've built or fixed.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a secure and scalable CI/CD pipeline for deploying to production Kubernetes clusters that enforces image signing and verification, vulnerability scanning, and policy-as-code gates. Recommend tools (for example: Tekton or ArgoCD, cosign/notation for signing, Trivy for scanning, OPA/Gatekeeper for policies), explain how signing keys and secrets are managed, and describe automated rollback and audit trails.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
A third-party API you depend on is flaky and has caused repeated incidents. Create a decision framework to evaluate options (build redundancy, add client-side resilience like retries/backoff/circuit-breakers, cache responses, or replace the dependency). Recommend an approach and justify it with cost, reliability and implementation time trade-offs.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
As an SRE candidate, summarize your hands-on SRE background in 2-3 concise bullet points. Include specific technologies you used (for example: Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Vault), two concrete examples of systems or services you built or operated, and measurable impact (for example: improved uptime from X% to Y%, reduced MTTR by Z minutes). Be explicit about your role and ownership.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design an idempotent automation workflow to roll TLS certificates or credentials across a fleet of Kubernetes services using HashiCorp Vault and Kubernetes Jobs/Controllers. Describe how to coordinate rollouts, ensure idempotency and safe partial application, verification steps after rotation, failure handling, and how to avoid cascading restarts that could cause outages.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the differences between Prometheus federation and long-term storage solutions like Thanos and Cortex. Describe architecture options, trade-offs (cost, query latency, operational complexity), and when you'd choose federation vs a remote storage approach for a multi-cluster deployment.
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