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Site Reliability Engineer interviews at Google, Amazon, Meta and the AI-first companies are decided in rounds most preparation ignores: the non-abstract large system design round, the operational design round (pipelines, rollouts, secrets, backups), and a discussion round about how you measure reliability. This plan sequences the site's questions, guides, quizzes and concept pages into six weeks, easiest first, with a free week one so you can judge the format before paying for anything.
Built for someone with a few weeks before an SRE, production engineer or infrastructure engineer loop who already writes code and has run something in production. If you are preparing for a pure software engineer loop, the design weeks still apply but the coding week is thin — use the software engineer role page instead.
Seven weeks, 49 steps, about 23 hours. Week one is free with no account.
Weeks 1, 2 of the six-week plan, combined.
Six weeks at roughly four to six hours a week, or about 25 hours in total. The plan compresses to as few as two weeks by dropping the optional steps first, and stretches to twelve; the core questions stay in every version.
Week one is entirely free with no account: the guide, both questions, the quiz and the discussion question. Weeks two to six use Pro questions for the design, operational and behavioral rounds; the blog posts, concept pages, quizzes and tools in those weeks stay free, and the week-three URL shortener is free too.
Progress is derived from questions you have completed and quizzes you have taken, not from a stored position in the plan. If you solved a question last month, the plan already shows it done. Reading steps are not tracked, so the percentage counts questions and quizzes only.
Week one is free. From week 2 the plan uses 13 Pro questions and 3 Pro behavioral guides; the posts, concept pages, quizzes and tools stay free.
See Pro pricingWeeks 2, 3 of the six-week plan, combined.
Weeks 3, 4 of the six-week plan, combined.
Replication, consensus and queues — the vocabulary every design answer in an SRE loop is graded in.
Weeks 4, 5 of the six-week plan, combined.
Weeks 5, 6 of the six-week plan, combined.
SRE coding rounds test whether you can write a working script under time pressure, not whether you know dynamic programming. Arrays, hash maps, strings and binary search cover most of what is asked; take the easiest first and stop when they feel routine.
Close the two rounds that eliminate senior candidates most often, then do one full hard question under time.
SRE coding rounds test whether you can write a working script under time pressure, not whether you know dynamic programming. Arrays, hash maps, strings and binary search cover most of what is asked; take the easiest first and stop when they feel routine.
Only if the pattern set above felt easy. Graphs and heaps come up in SRE loops when the question is about dependency ordering or scheduling.
Typically a coding round, one or two system design rounds using the non-abstract large system design (NALSD) format, an operational design round on pipelines, rollouts, secrets or backups, a discussion round on reliability and troubleshooting, and a behavioral round. The plan gives each round its own week.
Yes. Platform and production engineering loops share the operational design round and the reliability discussion with SRE loops; weeks two, four and five apply directly. A dedicated platform engineer plan is planned once this one has earned its keep.