Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that combines software engineering and IT operations to ensure the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of systems. Preparing for an SRE interview can be challenging, given the breadth of knowledge required. Below are the top 22 SRE interview questions and answers to help you ace your next interview in 2025.
Tools and Automation
Which tools are essential for SRE?
How do you implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?
What is Chaos Engineering, and how does it help?
Technical Questions
Explain the concept of SLO, SLA, and SLI
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- SLO (Service Level Objective): A target level of reliability a service aims to achieve.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement): A formal agreement with users outlining the service’s reliability expectations.
- SLI (Service Level Indicator): A measurable metric (e.g., uptime, latency) to track performance.
- What is a blameless postmortem, and why is it important?
A blameless postmortem is a retrospective analysis of an incident that focuses on learning and preventing future issues without assigning blame. It fosters trust and encourages honest discussions about failures. - Describe the importance of monitoring in SRE.
Monitoring ensures the health of systems by collecting metrics, generating alerts, and identifying issues in real-time. Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog are widely used in SRE. - What is the difference between proactive and reactive monitoring?
Proactive monitoring aims to predict and prevent issues before they occur. Reactive monitoring identifies and addresses issues after they arise.
Behavioral Questions
How do you prioritize tasks when multiple systems face issues?
I prioritize based on the impact on business-critical services, user experience, and SLAs.
Describe a time when you automated a manual process. (Provide a specific example, such as writing a script to automate log analysis or deployment tasks.)
How do you ensure effective collaboration with development teams?
Regular communication, shared objectives, and using tools like Jira or Confluence to track progress ensure alignment between SRE and development teams.
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