Technical screening questions
Ask for one example per question and listen for specifics.
- What is the difference between an SLI, SLO and SLA? A good answer: Indicator, target and contractual commitment; error budgets.
- Walk through an incident you led. A good answer: Detection, mitigation, communication and a blameless review.
- How do you reduce alert noise? A good answer: Alert on symptoms tied to SLOs, remove flapping alerts.
- How do you find a memory leak in production? A good answer: Metrics trends, profiling and safe sampling.
- How do you decide what to automate? A good answer: Frequency, risk and time saved.
Quick screening questions
Use these when you have only a few minutes.
- How do you define and track an SLO?
- Describe your on-call experience and a hard incident.
- What do you automate first when toil appears?
What separates the levels
Match the level to the requirement before you submit.
- Junior: handles alerts with runbooks.
- Mid: improves monitoring and owns services.
- Senior: sets SLOs, leads incidents and designs resilience.
Red flags
Any of these is a reason to probe further.
- Operations experience with no automation.
- Cannot define an SLO.
- Never carried a pager.
Tools you should hear mentioned
A site reliability engineer with real experience usually names several of these without prompting.
- Kubernetes
- Prometheus and Grafana
- Datadog or similar
- Terraform
- Python or Go
- PagerDuty or similar
Run the call well
Ask for the last project first, then dig into the second or third question. Take notes on versions, team size and outcomes, and record them with the submission so the vendor’s later technical interview does not surprise you.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a site reliability engineer screening call take?
Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough to cover the project, three technical questions and availability, rate and work authorization.
Do recruiters need to know the technology?
Working vocabulary is enough. Use the sourcing guide for the role and listen for specifics instead of judging technical depth yourself.