Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions

2,547 site reliability engineer interview questions shared by candidates

Three questions were asked - 1) Fizzball (but with LinkedIn). Given an integer 1 to n, print "Linked" if divisible by 4 and "In" if divisible by 6 and "LinkedIn" if divisible by 4 and 6. Print the integer if it doesn't meet any of the above criteria. 2) Recursive API question. It's easy but tricky given the exam conditions. You are given an employee API URL to GET the names of an employee reporting structure. The JSON response returns the employee some othet key-value paor and the reports under the employee. The key here is to recognize the need to use recursion. At the very least mention it so they are aware you know what to do even if you don't get it completely correct. 3) You are given some logs with timestamp, process ids, log statement . You need to parse the the log file and print out in two columns the time stamp and the number of times the same process (or thereabout) shows up in the same time stamp (in order words column A has the time stamp, column B has the count). I think this needed to be outputted in CSV or something, but interviewer mentioned it didn't really matter. Hope this helps someone ace their next interview with them. Goodluck!
avatar

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Interviewed at LinkedIn

3.8
Jun 1, 2021

Three questions were asked - 1) Fizzball (but with LinkedIn). Given an integer 1 to n, print "Linked" if divisible by 4 and "In" if divisible by 6 and "LinkedIn" if divisible by 4 and 6. Print the integer if it doesn't meet any of the above criteria. 2) Recursive API question. It's easy but tricky given the exam conditions. You are given an employee API URL to GET the names of an employee reporting structure. The JSON response returns the employee some othet key-value paor and the reports under the employee. The key here is to recognize the need to use recursion. At the very least mention it so they are aware you know what to do even if you don't get it completely correct. 3) You are given some logs with timestamp, process ids, log statement . You need to parse the the log file and print out in two columns the time stamp and the number of times the same process (or thereabout) shows up in the same time stamp (in order words column A has the time stamp, column B has the count). I think this needed to be outputted in CSV or something, but interviewer mentioned it didn't really matter. Hope this helps someone ace their next interview with them. Goodluck!

You take over a new service and discover it has no monitoring. What monitoring would you put in place within the first week to ensure the service is working? Within the first month? How do you monitor failures which are local to a region?
avatar

Site Reliability Engineer

Interviewed at LinkedIn

3.8
Apr 1, 2020

You take over a new service and discover it has no monitoring. What monitoring would you put in place within the first week to ensure the service is working? Within the first month? How do you monitor failures which are local to a region?

You will be asked to do live troubleshooting of an Apache (httpd) web service. You will not be given many details by the recruiter, so it's easy to study the wrong thing here. It ended up that you need to be familiar with the httpd config file and Aliases. You need to be familiar with how to change Linux filesystem permissions, but you can ignore that you are running on RedHat and you won't need to touch SELinux permissions. Be careful of one problem where they will have two nearly-identical file names, except one has a hypen and the other Unicode dash character. They look very similar in many fonts. Make sure you know how to do a simple GDB backtrace. You will be asked to debug a segfault and work around it (via simple file rename).
avatar

Site Reliability Engineer

Interviewed at LinkedIn

3.8
Apr 1, 2020

You will be asked to do live troubleshooting of an Apache (httpd) web service. You will not be given many details by the recruiter, so it's easy to study the wrong thing here. It ended up that you need to be familiar with the httpd config file and Aliases. You need to be familiar with how to change Linux filesystem permissions, but you can ignore that you are running on RedHat and you won't need to touch SELinux permissions. Be careful of one problem where they will have two nearly-identical file names, except one has a hypen and the other Unicode dash character. They look very similar in many fonts. Make sure you know how to do a simple GDB backtrace. You will be asked to debug a segfault and work around it (via simple file rename).

Viewing 1471 - 1480 interview questions

Glassdoor has 2,547 interview questions and reports from Site reliability engineer interviews. Prepare for your interview. Get hired. Love your job.