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Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions
Practice 9403 coding, system design and machine learning questions from 546 companies, sorted by role, topic and interview round. Every question has step-by-step hints, a code runner that supports 8 languages and an AI mentor; members also get the full solution walkthrough.
- 9403
- Questions
- 546
- Companies
- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 1–12 of 12 results
- ByteDanceMediumSite Reliability EngineerHow You Build Service Stability and Troubleshoot Production Incidents
Tests an SRE candidate's ability to design proactively stable services and execute structured, mitigation-first production incident management under high-throughput conditions.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenSREIncident ManagementObservability - ByteDanceHardSite Reliability EngineerHow to triage slow service alerts
This question evaluates operational troubleshooting and incident management competencies — system observability, severity assessment, blast-radius and user-impact analysis, dependency and performance diagnostics, mitigation decision-making, and incident communication.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceEasySite Reliability EngineerTriage a Suddenly Slow Production Service
This question tests your structured approach to incident response and root cause analysis in a distributed production environment.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenSREIncident ResponseDistributed Systems - CitadelMediumSite Reliability EngineerSolve Five Core Python Data-Processing Exercises
Implement and explain: repeat a message `n` times with blank lines; square a list then reverse it; FizzBuzz; count case-sensitive words; and return the second-largest unique integer or `None`. Make the API or object boundaries explicit, then cover invariants, edge cases, testing strategy, and operational trade-offs.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - Hudson River TradingMediumSite Reliability EngineerCompare Python Generators, Decorators, and Context Managers
Tests understanding of Python's execution timing, protocol methods, and resource cleanup across generators, decorators, and context managers, culminating in a robust lazy stream processor.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenPythonResource ManagementDecorators - Hudson River TradingMediumSite Reliability EngineerExplain Why du and df Report Different Disk Usage
This question tests your understanding of Linux filesystem internals, specifically how kernel-level storage reporting differs from user-space directory traversal.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenLinuxFilesystemSRE - Hudson River TradingMediumSite Reliability EngineerReason About Unix Signals, Zombies, and Process Reaping
Assess understanding of Unix process lifecycles, signal handling mechanics, zombie state accumulation, and process reaping responsibilities in parent processes and PID 1.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screenunixlinux-kernelsystems - Hudson River TradingMediumSite Reliability EngineerTroubleshoot a Host That Rejects SSH Connections
Tests systematic Linux systems and networking troubleshooting methodology by designing an evidence-based diagnostic path for an unreachable or rejecting SSH service.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screenlinuxnetworkingtroubleshooting - MetaMediumSite Reliability EngineerTroubleshoot a production server outage
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in observability, incident response, and Linux/server operations, including troubleshooting production outages, isolating latency causes, identifying running processes and services, and recognizing finite resource bottlenecks.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSite Reliability EngineerLive troubleshooting: diagnose and mitigate very high CPU on a public-facing service
Live troubleshooting scenario for a senior reliability role: a public-facing service shows very high CPU, and you must keep answering what you would check next. It tests impact-first triage, separating traffic growth from per-request regressions, profiling, and weighing rollback, scaling, throttling and asynchronous queueing.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSite Reliability EngineerWhen to automate operations work, and good-enough versus excellent automation
Reliability engineering discussion question: explain your philosophy on automating operational work to free engineers for development, your bar for good-enough versus excellent automation, and where automation stops being worth it. It tests toil measurement, cost-benefit reasoning, safety guardrails and concrete examples.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - PinterestEasySite Reliability EngineerFetch a Field from Two URLs, Extract Valid IP Addresses, and Rank Them by Count
A practical scripting exercise for a site reliability role: send GET requests with a required header to two URLs, pull a text field from each response, extract every valid IP address, and rank the addresses by how often they appear. It tests HTTP error handling, strict IPv4 validation, code reuse and deterministic sorting.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
Citadel
Hudson River Trading
Meta
Microsoft
Pinterest