Loading…
Also forDevOps EngineerProduction EngineerSystems EngineerSite reliability engineer loops are the broadest of the roles here, and they are the one place where the numbers genuinely matter. The design round expects you to show that a design survives its own load rather than merely that it is well shaped, and there is nearly always a debugging round where you are handed symptoms with no cause attached. Coding is real and is usually closer to systems work than to puzzles.
A system design question carried through to capacity arithmetic; a troubleshooting or debugging scenario; coding at a solid but rarely exotic level; and discussion of reliability practice — service level objectives, error budgets, alerting philosophy and what happens during an incident. Operating-system and networking fundamentals come up more than in other loops.
Treating the numbers as an optional flourish. In this loop the arithmetic is the assessment: a design presented without an estimate of the machines, bandwidth or storage it needs has skipped the part the round exists to test.
Prefer a sequence to a catalogue?
The 6-week Site Reliability Engineer study plan orders this material week by week, easiest first, with a free first week and progress derived from what you have already completed.
Fully unlocked, solutions included. Enough to see whether the format suits you.
Broad questions with no system to draw. Free, and frequently where this loop is decided.
Easiest first. 51 in total for this role.
Symptoms with no cause attached. 6 in total for this role, easiest first.
59 coding questions match this role. Easiest first.
At senior level it eliminates more candidates than the technical rounds do. Free interactive guides to the questions that come up most.
Usually solid rather than exotic. Expect data-structure and string or array manipulation at a level where clean, correct code under discussion matters more than finding an unusual optimal solution. Some loops substitute a scripting or log-processing problem.
Designing a system and then computing whether it actually works — how many machines, how much bandwidth, how much storage — and iterating when the arithmetic says it does not. Reliability loops weight this heavily, and the interactive system design guides here include capacity calculations as a first-class step for that reason.