Typeform India Site Reliability Engineer Interview: Rounds, Questions and Preparation

What the job involves

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at global tech companies ensure that large-scale, customer-facing systems stay fast, available, and reliable. Day to day, they monitor production services, respond to incidents, automate repetitive operations, and improve system resilience through code and infrastructure changes. Freshers in this role typically start with observability, incident response, and small automation projects while learning from senior engineers.

Role and Technical Knowledge

1. 1

   What does an SRE do differently from a traditional DevOps or system administrator?

   Strong answers highlight the software engineering approach to operations, use of SLOs and error budgets, and automation to reduce toil.

2. 2

   Explain the difference between an SLI, SLO, and SLA with a simple example.

   Define each term clearly: SLI is a measured metric (e.g., request latency), SLO is a target (e.g., 99.9% under 200ms), and SLA is a contract with consequences.

3. 3

   How would you monitor a web application to detect a sudden increase in errors?

   Mention metrics (error rate, latency), logs, tracing, dashboards, and alerting thresholds with tools like Prometheus and Grafana.

4. 4

   What is toil in SRE, and how can you reduce it?

   Describe repetitive manual work, then give examples of automation, self-service tools, and runbook improvements.

Practical Scenarios and Troubleshooting

1. 5

   A production service is returning 500 errors for 10% of users. How do you investigate?

   Walk through checking dashboards, logs, recent deployments, dependencies, and rollback options while communicating status.

2. 6

   Users report that a website is slow only from one region. What could be the cause?

   Consider DNS, CDN, regional load balancer issues, network latency, and cloud region health; suggest checks and mitigations.

3. 7

   How would you design a simple health check endpoint for a microservice?

   Cover checking dependencies (database, cache), returning appropriate HTTP status codes, and avoiding false positives.

4. 8

   You need to deploy a new version with zero downtime. What steps do you take?

   Mention blue-green or canary deployments, load balancer draining, health checks, and rollback plans.

Behavioural and Situational Questions

1. 9

   Tell me about a time you fixed a technical problem under time pressure.

   Use STAR format: describe the situation, your actions, the outcome, and what you learned about staying calm and systematic.

2. 10

   How would you handle a disagreement with a senior engineer about the root cause of an incident?

   Show respect, data-driven discussion, willingness to listen, and focus on resolving the incident first.

3. 11

   Describe a situation where you had to learn a new tool or technology quickly.

   Highlight curiosity, structured learning, and applying the new skill to a real project or problem.

4. 12

   Why do you want to work as an SRE in a fast-growing global company?

   Connect personal interest in reliability, automation, and scale with the company's need for stable, fast services.

HR and Culture Fit

1. 13

   Are you comfortable with on-call rotations and occasional weekend work?

   Be honest and positive; mention willingness to learn incident response and maintain work-life balance.

2. 14

   How do you prioritise multiple incidents or tasks at once?

   Explain impact-based prioritisation, communication with stakeholders, and using runbooks or checklists.

3. 15

   Where do you see yourself in two to three years as an SRE?

   Show growth towards deeper automation, system design, or mentoring while staying hands-on with reliability.

4. 16

   What do you know about our company's product and why does reliability matter for it?

   Research the company's user base and uptime needs; link reliability to customer trust and business outcomes.