Global tech
Cohesity India Site Reliability Engineer Interview: Rounds, Questions and Preparation
For Site Reliability Engineer roles at companies like Cohesity India
What the job involves
Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at global tech companies ensure that large-scale distributed systems remain highly available, performant, and scalable. They combine software engineering with systems engineering to automate operations, build observability, and respond to incidents. Day to day, they write code to improve reliability, define SLOs, and collaborate with development teams to design resilient services.
Role and Technical Knowledge
- 1
What is the difference between SLI, SLO, and SLA? Give an example.
Define each term clearly: SLI is a metric, SLO is a target, SLA is a contract. Use a web service example like latency or availability.
- 2
Explain how you would troubleshoot a Linux server that is running out of memory.
Mention checking top/htop, free -m, identifying processes, checking logs, and possible solutions like killing processes or adding swap.
- 3
What happens when you type a URL into a browser? Focus on DNS, TCP, and HTTP.
Walk through DNS resolution, TCP handshake, HTTP request/response, and rendering. Keep it concise but accurate.
- 4
How does Kubernetes help in achieving high availability?
Discuss replicas, self-healing, rolling updates, and service discovery. Mention liveness and readiness probes.
Practical Scenarios
- 5
A service's error rate suddenly spikes. How do you debug it?
Start with dashboards and logs, check recent deployments, correlate with metrics, and follow a systematic elimination process.
- 6
You need to automate the deployment of a microservice. What tools and steps would you use?
Outline CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins/GitLab, containerization with Docker, and orchestration with Kubernetes. Mention testing and rollback.
- 7
How would you design a monitoring system for a distributed application?
Cover metrics collection (Prometheus), logging (ELK), tracing (Jaeger), alerting, and dashboards. Emphasize SLO-based alerts.
- 8
Write a Python script to check if a website is up and alert if it is down.
Use requests library to check status code, schedule with cron, and send alert via email or Slack webhook. Show error handling.
Behavioral and Situational
- 9
Describe a time you had to learn a new technology quickly for a project.
Use STAR method: situation, task, action, result. Highlight resourcefulness and outcome.
- 10
Tell me about a time you worked in a team to solve a problem.
Focus on collaboration, your specific role, and how you overcame challenges together.
- 11
How do you handle pressure during an incident?
Emphasize staying calm, following runbooks, communicating clearly, and prioritizing impact.
- 12
Why do you want to be an SRE?
Connect personal interest in automation, reliability, and coding to the role. Mention desire to work on large-scale systems.
HR and Company Fit
- 13
Why do you want to work at a company like Cohesity India?
Research the company's products and culture. Align your skills and career goals with their mission in data management and cloud.
- 14
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Show ambition to grow technically, perhaps into a senior SRE or architect role, while contributing to the company.
- 15
What are your salary expectations?
Research industry standards for freshers in India. Give a range and express flexibility based on overall compensation.
- 16
Do you have any questions for us?
Ask about team structure, on-call rotation, or learning opportunities. Shows genuine interest.
Coding round
Site Reliability Engineer interviews usually include a coding round. Practise planning the solution out loud, then review code the AI writes from your plan, in Python, Java, C++, C or JavaScript.
Ready to try it for real?
Take a timed test or talk through a mock interview for this role, then see your scores.
This is practice material for Site Reliability Engineer roles, written with AI. It is not a list of questions Cohesity India or any other company has asked.