practice a little every day, paws crossed ♡
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 1–30 of 33 results
- ByteDanceHardSite Reliability EngineerDetermine whether squares can fit
This question evaluates spatial reasoning, combinatorial packing, and constraint-satisfaction skills in the context of placing integer-aligned squares within an m x n rectangle.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSite Reliability EngineerGenerate combinations and permutations
This problem tests your ability to implement recursive backtracking algorithms to generate all possible permutations and combinations of a given set of distinct integers.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenRecursionBacktrackingCombinatorics - 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 - ByteDanceMediumSite Reliability EngineerImplement Sorted Search and Array Updates
This question evaluates proficiency in array manipulation and fundamental algorithmic techniques—specifically binary search for sorted arrays, digit-wise arithmetic with carry handling, and in-place stable reordering—within the Coding & Algorithms domain and with attention to time and space complexity.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardSite Reliability EngineerPlace Non-Attacking Queens
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in combinatorial search, constraint reasoning, and algorithmic design for arranging non-attacking pieces on a grid.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSite Reliability EngineerSRE Background: Development vs. Stability Focus and Your Most Memorable Project
This question assesses a candidate's ability to balance rapid feature delivery with system reliability, while evaluating their depth of technical ownership and ability to articulate the impact of their engineering decisions.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical ScreenBehavioralSRESystem Design - ByteDanceMediumSite Reliability EngineerSolve Stack and String Shift Problems
This problem tests your ability to handle nested validation using stacks and coordinate transformation using modular arithmetic on strings.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenStackStringsModulo Arithmetic - 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 - ByteDanceEasySite Reliability EngineerValidate Matching Brackets
Tests stack-based parsing fundamentals, early mismatch detection, and linear-time string validation for balanced bracket sequences.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screenstackstringsparsing - 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 - CoreweaveMediumSite Reliability EngineerDesign Batch Reboots for Machines
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that orchestrates machine reboots while maintaining cluster capacity, service availability, and operational safety.
System DesignOnsiteOrchestrationDistributed SystemsReliability - CoreweaveMediumSite Reliability EngineerQuery Machines and Mark Them Offline
This problem tests the ability to interact with external APIs, handle asynchronous operations with retries, and implement conditional filtering based on system metadata.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteAPIAutomationError Handling - 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 - LegoraHardSite Reliability EngineerDesign a Compliance Audit Log Platform
Design an immutable, multi-tenant compliance audit logging platform that supports canonical ingestion, cryptographic tamper evidence, gap detection, and efficient legal investigation queries at scale.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsSRESecurity - MetaMediumSite Reliability EngineerImplement a Streaming VMStat Alert
This question tests the ability to design a memory-efficient sliding window mechanism for monitoring high-frequency system metrics in real-time.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenSliding WindowData StructuresStreaming - 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 - MetaMediumSite Reliability EngineerValidate abbreviations and brackets
This question evaluates proficiency in string parsing, pattern validation, and algorithmic correctness, covering abbreviation interpretation and bracket balancing while requiring careful handling of edge cases and input constraints.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSite Reliability EngineerBehavioral: a problem that stumped you, your peers and AI tools, and how you solved it
Behavioral question on hard problem solving: describe a problem that stumped you, your peers and the AI tools you tried, and how you got past it. It tests systematic debugging under uncertainty, judgment about where tools and colleagues fall short, resourcefulness, and turning the fix into lasting team knowledge.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSite Reliability EngineerFind where two singly linked lists merge, given each as a sequence of node ids
Coding practice question: two singly linked lists that may merge into a shared tail are given as sequences of node ids, and you must return the id of the node where they first meet, or -1. It tests reasoning about linked list structure, linear-time traversal, and edge cases such as no shared node or one list being the other's tail.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - 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 EngineerOn-call behavioral: judging severity, escalating, and tracing an issue to a recent change
Behavioral incident-response question for a senior reliability role: describe an on-call incident on a large customer-facing service and how you judged severity and escalated, then a case where you tied runtime signals to a recent deployment or feature flag change. It tests triage judgment, coordination and reducing time to resolution.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSite Reliability EngineerSQL: count files where bull and bear appear as standalone space-delimited words
SQL practice question: given a table of files and their text content, count how many files contain the words bull and bear as standalone, space-delimited words. It tests careful pattern matching, case sensitivity, NULL handling, and returning a row for each word even when its count is zero.
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)Onsite - 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 - OracleEasySite Reliability EngineerMitigate an Emergency During On-Call
This question assesses the candidate's ability to handle high-pressure production incidents by evaluating their structured approach to containment, risk assessment, and post-incident remediation.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsiteIncident ManagementSREOn-call - OracleEasySite Reliability EngineerMonitor 100,000 GPU Hosts and Trigger Repair Workflows
This question tests the ability to design a distributed telemetry collection and automated incident remediation system for a large-scale hardware fleet.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsObservabilityAutomation - 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
Coreweave
Hudson River Trading
Meta
Microsoft
Oracle
Pinterest