Top 7 SRE Interview Questions Every Candidate Should Master

Beyond technical skills, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) helps balance trade‑offs and pressures to achieve fast, safe delivery, acting as a cultural and practical bridge between development and operations.

Question 1: How do you decide whether the team should develop new features or pay down technical debt?

This question lets SRE candidates demonstrate how to handle seemingly conflicting priorities by establishing shared priorities that the team can agree on and act upon.

Question 2: How do you set SLOs and SLIs, and adjust them when necessary?

SRE’s core responsibility is defining and refining Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs), especially when developers lack visibility into the performance baselines of the services they build.

Question 3: Which of the three observability pillars (logs, metrics, traces) is most important to you, and what would you increase exposure for?

Observability—comprising logging, metrics, and tracing—is fundamental to SRE and a data‑driven discipline essential for any reliability role.

Question 4: How have you implemented process improvements or other changes in the past?

Even when existing monitoring practices, call‑out procedures, and standard processes exist, SREs should challenge the status quo, requiring creativity and resilience.

Question 5: How do you balance the wishes and needs of different stakeholders within the team?

Upstream (development) and downstream (operations) tasks, processes, and procedures must be understood and, when necessary, altered, recognizing that owners may protect existing practices.

Question 6: How do customer experience and/or employee experience influence your SRE strategy?

The best SREs translate external perspectives—customer and employee experiences—into reliable observability and monitoring strategies that evolve into proactive reliability practices.

Question 7: How do you stay current with industry trends and toolchains?

Continuously learning new technologies and approaches is essential for solving old problems with fresh solutions.

The above seven questions are the key topics SRE interviewers focus on. The SRE Foundation course will launch at the GOPS 2021 Global Operations Conference in Shenzhen (May 19‑20).

The course introduces SRE’s evolution, future direction, and provides practical methods and tools to embed reliability across the organization, using real‑world cases. Graduates will be able to set and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) in their companies.

It also prepares learners to pass the SRE Foundation certification exam.

Course Audience

Anyone interested in higher reliability

Anyone interested in modern IT leadership and organizational change

SRE engineers

Business managers

Stakeholders, consultants, DevOps practitioners, IT leads, IT managers, team leads, product owners, Scrum masters, software engineers, system integrators, tool providers

Course Outline

Module 1: SRE Principles and Practices

What is Site Reliability Engineering?

SRE vs. DevOps: differences

SRE principles and conventions

Module 2: Service Level Objectives and Error Budgets

Service Level Objectives (SLO)

Error budgets

Error budget policies

Module 3: Reducing Toil

What is toil?

Why is it painful?

Module 4: Monitoring and Service Level Indicators

Service Level Indicators (SLI)

Monitoring

Observability

Module 5: SRE Tools and Automation

Definition of automation

Automation focus

Automation hierarchy

Security automation

Automation tools

Module 6: Antifragility and Learning from Failure

Why learn from failure

Benefits of antifragility

Shifting organizational balance

Module 7: Organizational Impact of SRE

Why organizations adopt SRE

Adoption models

On‑call practices

Post‑mortems and retrospectives

SRE at scale

Module 8: SRE and Other Frameworks

SRE and other frameworks

Future outlook

Additional resources

Exam preparation

Exam requirements, weighting, glossary

Sample exam review

Course Objectives

History of SRE and its practice at Google

Relationship between SRE, DevOps, and other popular frameworks

Fundamental principles behind SRE

Service Level Objectives (SLO) and user focus

Service Level Indicators (SLI) and modern monitoring environments

Error budgets and related policies

Observability as an indicator of service health

SRE tools, automation techniques, and security importance

Antifragility, failure learning, and testing methods

Organizational impact of introducing SRE

For detailed course inquiries, see the images below: