I wanted make this post for SRE space as I mostlty find dev related posts in leetcode. I would really encourage leetcode community to posts related to devops, sysadm and SRE topics.
- MS from top 30 school in CS
- 2 yoe in major finance firm
Interview experience:
Screening rounds
- two LC easy - 45 mins
- Debugging scenario - I was tested to see which tools I would use to debug the asked issue. I gave tools in each layer of the OS stack
https://medium.com/@adminstoolbox/debugging-using-strace-efda7d65be1d
Onsite:
Bloomberg onsite has been the most engaging and intensive interview I had for the SRE role. There was an interview round for every stack right from the hardware level.
round 1:
I was asked to design rack for database fault tolerence (i.e any machine failure should not impact availibility), questions related to RAID, detecting disk failures etc
round 2: config management
I was asked to talk in depth about config management tool I had in my resume. Followed by LC medium white boarding
round 3:
Container management + system design
what container is made of (talk about cgroup and namespaces)
system design - How do you design your own time series database (scalability + variable load on the database)
round 4:
This interview was done by two tech leads, one asked about system design, other asked about debugging question in depth
Debugging question: I was asked to find out possible slow down of typical web application
round 5:
With department head, talked about engineering culture at Bloomberg
Ended with interview with HR, talked about culture, numbers and exisiting offers.
I thought I did reasonably well, had real chance. But the result was bit disspointing, I hope it was not the easy decision to make for them.
I hope this post help someone who is going through SRE interviews like me.