Technical Foundation and Self Assessment Questions

Covers baseline technical knowledge and the candidate's ability to honestly assess and communicate their technical strengths and weaknesses. Topics include fundamental infrastructure and networking concepts, operating system and protocol basics, core development and platform concepts relevant to the role, and the candidate's candid self evaluation of their depth in specific technologies. Interviewers use this to calibrate how technical the candidate is expected to be, identify areas for growth, and ensure alignment of expectations between product and engineering for collaboration.

MediumTechnical

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You receive a postmortem that lists root cause as a database failover but lacks actionable remediation. As an SRE reviewer, identify three concrete missing elements that should be in the postmortem and propose one immediate and one long-term corrective action.

EasyTechnical

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Define SLI, SLO, and SLA in the context of a web service. Give concrete examples of a latency SLI and an availability SLO for a public API and explain how error budget should be calculated and consumed by engineering teams.

HardTechnical

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You suspect an intermittent network partition between two data centers causing inconsistent state in a distributed datastore. Detail the tools, packet-level and application-level checks, and experiments you would run to confirm partition, measure frequency, and suggest mitigation strategies.

EasyTechnical

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Explain the key differences between TCP and UDP. For each protocol describe reliability guarantees, connection model, ordering, congestion control, typical production use cases, and one scenario where an SRE would prefer UDP over TCP. Include monitoring signals you would watch for each.

EasyTechnical

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Describe the differences between a process and a thread on a Unix-like OS. Explain how context switching, memory sharing, and scheduling interact, and why an SRE needs to choose between multithreading and multiprocess models for a production service.

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