How we interview · Site reliability engineer

    Hire site reliability engineers who keep production up

    SREs, DevOps and platform engineers, mid-level to principal, screened on how they design for failure, run incidents and remove toil, not on which tools they've listed.

    Reliability engineers are judged on the nights nothing happens. That makes them hard to assess from a CV: two people with the same Kubernetes and Terraform keywords can have very different instincts when production is on fire.

    We look for engineers who treat reliability as a design problem. They set targets the business agrees with, build the monitoring that tells you when you're missing them, automate the repetitive work, and run calm, blameless incidents.

    What they work on: AWS, GCP or Azure; Kubernetes and containers; Terraform; CI/CD; Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog and similar.

    When to hire one

    • Your developers are on call and it's slowing product work.
    • Outages are found by customers before your monitoring.
    • Cloud costs are growing faster than traffic.

    What we assess in site reliability engineers

    Every report also covers impact, judgement, how they raise the team and how they work with others.

    Craft

    Systems knowledge
    Linux, networking, DNS, load balancing and how their cloud actually behaves under stress.
    Reliability design
    SLOs and error budgets, capacity, graceful degradation and safe rollouts.
    Incident response
    Triage under pressure, clear communication, and postmortems that lead to real fixes.
    Automation
    Infrastructure as code and tooling that removes toil instead of moving it.
    Observability
    Metrics, logs and traces that answer questions, not dashboards nobody reads.

    How we recommend a level

    Mid-level
    Runs and improves existing systems, automates routine work and handles incidents with support.
    Senior
    Is the go-to person for at least one critical system; sets SLOs and leads incidents.
    Staff / lead
    Shapes reliability across many services and makes the trade-off between speed and safety explicit.
    Principal
    Defines the reliability and infrastructure strategy for the whole organisation.

    The 60-minute interview

    Warm-up (10 min)
    An incident they handled: what they saw first, what they did, what changed afterwards.
    Live scenario (25 min)
    A simulated outage with graphs and logs. We watch how they narrow it down and communicate.
    Design (20 min)
    Make a service reliable for a stated target: SLOs, alerts, redundancy and rollout plan.
    Their questions (5 min)
    What they ask about on-call and tooling says a lot.

    Red flags we screen for

    • Alerts on everything, so nothing is urgent.
    • Postmortems that end with 'be more careful'.
    • Can't explain what a tool does underneath.

    What you receive for each shortlisted candidate:

    Candidate V.P.

    Senior Site Reliability Engineer · 60-minute technical interview

    Sample report
    Tested
    A latency spike scenario with metrics and logs, and an SLO and alerting design for a payments API.
    Strong
    Found the bad deploy in under ten minutes and communicated status clearly. Good error-budget reasoning.
    Gaps
    Little experience with multi-region failover. Terraform modules were hard to reuse.
    Level
    Senior.
    Probe next
    How they would test a regional failover, and how they reduce alert noise for a team.
    RecommendationShortlist
    A sample interview report. The candidate is fictional; the format is the one clients receive.

    Questions about hiring site reliability engineers

    Yes. The titles overlap, so we agree at the brief what the role actually owns: production reliability, CI/CD and developer tooling, or the internal platform. We interview for that.

    First interviewed profiles usually reach you within a few days of the brief, and selection through your own rounds takes about two weeks. Joining then depends on the candidate's notice period, which in India is often 30 to 90 days.

    A percentage of the hire's annual CTC, set by seniority and paid only when the candidate joins. There's no retainer and no fee if nobody joins.

    We agree the interviewer at the brief. If nobody on our panel is close enough to the role to judge it properly, we say so and don't take the role on.

    Other engineering roles we hire

    Hiring on your own terms? Permanent hiring, contract hires or interviews only.

    Tell us the role.

    Four details and we'll come back within a working day with how we'd approach it.

    No retainer. You pay only when someone joins. Or write to talent@algosmiths.com