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.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe how you would set up Kubernetes RBAC in a multi-team cluster so development teams can deploy to their own namespaces but cannot modify cluster-scoped resources. Provide example Role and RoleBinding (or ClusterRole) YAML snippets and explain how you would manage exceptions and audit RBAC changes.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a robust deployment and rollback strategy for a feature that requires coordinated changes across multiple services and database schema migrations. Detail patterns such as expand-contract migrations, feature flags, choreographed rollouts, and steps to safely rollback without corrupting data. Include tools and automation you'd use to enforce these patterns.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Describe a time you improved reliability by introducing automation or an architectural change. Be specific: what problem existed, what change or automation you implemented (for example: automated failover, improved autoscaling, observability additions), the metrics before and after the change (uptime, MTTR, incident count), obstacles you faced, and how you measured success. If you have not led such an improvement, propose a detailed, actionable plan instead.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Write a Python script or pseudocode that queries the Prometheus HTTP API to calculate a service's error budget burn rate and automatically opens or annotates a Jira ticket when the burn rate exceeds a threshold. Outline components (Prometheus query, threshold logic, Jira API integration), authentication handling, idempotency to avoid duplicate tickets, and error handling.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a disaster recovery plan for a stateful Postgres deployment running in the cloud (RDS or self-managed on EBS). Include target RPO and RTO, backup cadence and retention, cross-region replication options, failover procedures, validation and automated DR testing, and how you'd restore production traffic in a controlled way.
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