Hire a Certified
Site Reliability Engineer
in Days, Not Months

How do you define and measure SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for a service you own?

Strong candidates describe SLIs as the measured signals (latency, availability, error rate), SLOs as the target thresholds, and error budgets as the operational currency for balancing reliability with feature velocity. Look for engineers who have actually negotiated SLOs with product teams and used error budget burn rates to trigger reliability work — not just those who can define the terms.

Walk me through how you handle a major production incident from detection to resolution and post-incident review.

Look for a structured incident response: alert detection and triage, incident commander designation, stakeholder communication cadence, mitigation before root cause identification, blameless post-mortem process, and action item tracking. Engineers who skip post-mortems or treat them as blame sessions signal a culture mismatch for high-reliability environments.

Describe your experience automating infrastructure and eliminating toil. What's the most impactful automation you've built?

This separates true SREs from ops engineers who just run scripts. Look for engineers who quantify the toil they eliminated — hours per week, number of manual steps removed, error rates before and after — and who can articulate the Terraform, Ansible, or custom tooling decisions behind the automation. Engineers who automate for automation's sake without measuring impact signal shallow SRE practice.

How do you design for high availability and graceful degradation in a distributed system?

Strong candidates discuss redundancy patterns (multi-AZ, multi-region), circuit breakers, bulkheads, graceful degradation via feature flags, retry with exponential backoff, and chaos engineering to validate failure assumptions. Look for engineers who have thought about what happens when dependencies fail — not just how to prevent failures.

How do you approach capacity planning and ensure your infrastructure can handle growth or traffic spikes?

Mature SREs describe demand forecasting based on traffic trends, load testing to validate scaling assumptions, autoscaling configuration and limits, and the relationship between capacity headroom and error budget consumption. Look for engineers who treat capacity planning as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time pre-launch activity.

How do you work with development teams to improve the reliability of services before they reach production?

Strong SREs describe production readiness reviews (PRRs), design reviews with reliability criteria, runbook requirements, monitoring and alerting standards as part of the definition of done, and embedding SRE practices into CI/CD pipelines. Engineers who only engage with reliability after production incidents signal that they're operating reactively rather than shifting reliability left.