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
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.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Implement a simple, thread-safe LRU cache class in Python (pseudocode acceptable) that supports get(key) and put(key, value) with automatic eviction when capacity is reached. Explain how you achieve O(1) operations and how you ensure thread-safety in a multi-threaded environment.
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
Your organization wants to reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) for incidents from 10 minutes to under 1 minute across multiple services. Propose architectural and operational changes: monitoring rules, instrumentation, synthetic checks, agent-side telemetry, and alerting strategies to achieve this goal. Discuss trade-offs around cost, noise and false positives.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe at least two approaches you have used to manage secrets in cloud deployments (for example: HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS + Parameter Store, Kubernetes Secrets). For each approach explain how secrets are stored, how applications retrieve them, rotation strategies, and operational trade-offs around security and complexity.
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