Lakshya

Platform & Developer Experience

Operating track 2nd largest · clearest loop

2 · Site Reliability Engineer

The most standardised interview in this family, which makes it the most preparable.

What the job actually is

You own whether the service is up, measured against a number you agreed in advance. SLOs and error budgets, incident command, capacity planning, and the automation that removes the toil you just discovered. The distinction that matters: SRE serves end users; platform engineering serves internal developers. Teams blur it constantly, so ask who your customer is.

Titles this hides behind

Site Reliability EngineerStaff SRE Production EngineerDatabase Reliability Engineer SRE — Storage Layer ServicesReliability Engineer

The loop

Coding with an operations flavour Log parsing, time-series processing, retry logic. Not abstract algorithms — practical scripting under time pressure.
Non-abstract large system design — the decisive round Google's NALSD format, now widely copied. Design a system at scale with concrete numbers: requests per second, disks, bandwidth, machine counts. Hand-waving fails here in a way it does not in ordinary system design.
Incident simulation A live outage scenario. Interviewers check whether you consult dashboards, page the on-call, and record postmortem actions — process, not just diagnosis.
Linux and troubleshooting depth What actually happens when a process hangs, a disk fills, or DNS goes slow.
Blameless postmortem behavioural Now standard: run a postmortem where the person who caused the outage is in the room.

Prepare like this

  • Practise NALSD with real arithmetic. Take "design a service serving 50k QPS at 99.9%" and produce machine counts, disk throughput and failure-domain layout. Say the numbers out loud; the round rewards estimation fluency.
  • Have an error-budget policy opinion. The hardest rounds centre on what you do when the budget is exhausted and product wants to ship anyway.
  • Rehearse one incident end to end — detection, mitigation, root cause, and the action item that actually got done. Incident-response storytelling now outweighs traditional coding in these loops.
  • Refresh Linux internals. It is 19% of the corpus and close to 100% of the troubleshooting round.

Be ready for

  • "Your error budget is gone in week two of the quarter. Product wants to ship. What happens?" The signature question. There is no clean answer — they want your reasoning and your escalation path.
  • "Latency doubled ten minutes ago. Talk me through what you check, in order."
  • "What is an SLO you have set that turned out to be wrong?" Testing whether you have actually operated one rather than read about them.

Red flags in the posting

SRE that is ops with a pager. If the JD names no engineering time, no error budget and no automation ownership, you are being hired to absorb toil rather than remove it. Ask directly what fraction of time is project work — the Google-derived norm is 50%, and a team that cannot answer has not thought about it.

On-call with no rotation size. Ask how many people are in the rotation. Fewer than six is a burnout signal.

Compensation

United States — base$160k – $270kOn-call compensation varies enormously; ask whether it is paid.
India — total₹25L – ₹60LEstimated. Staff SRE roles in Bengaluru sit at the top of this range.

What this role tests

Themes, and where to learn them

These chapters are shared across every role that tests them, so preparation here compounds rather than being spent once.

Design under constraintThe decisive round for SRE, AI Platform, Infrastructure — and the reason strong engineers fail it.READ THE CHAPTER →Failure and incident narrativeEvery archetype asks for this story. The outage is the setting; the decisions are the content.READ THE CHAPTER →Measuring what resists measurementNamed in 59% of AI postings and 42% of platform postings. Almost nobody studies it deliberately.READ THE CHAPTER →

Practice questions across all themes →  ·  Back to Platform & Developer Experience →