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Google Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

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Updated Oct 28, 2011 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 8 ratings

3.5

“Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 8 ratings

Positive	62%
Neutral	25%
Negative	12%

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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 3 weeks)

Ever since I joined LinkedIn, I've been receiving emails from Google recruiters. I replied to the first one saying that as I'm an established contractor with my own company its difficult to switch to permanent employment. The emails kept coming in on a monthly basis. After around a year, I was on the look out for something different so I decided to look into it. The job description looked interesting and matched the work I'd been involved with in the previous years.
I had the initial pre-screening which had some technical questions and we discussed the role a little.
A week later I was offered a technical phone interview. It started with one question, which kept getting expanded until it covered a wide range of topics. It was clear they were after someone who knew how to approach a new problem, rather than someone who had memorized a bunch of commands suitable only for a particular situation. I felt it went really well, except at the end when I made some silly mistakes, but it was 10pm on a Friday, so I'm sure most people wouldn't be completely switched on at that point. Over all the interview was positive - it was relevant to my skills and the questions were fair.

A few more days passed and I got an email saying that they don't have any jobs which match my qualifications, with the usual "thank you for your interest in our company etc.." Not knowing what that really means, I wrote back asking for a reason, and feedback on the technical interview. I explained where I thought I went wrong, and asked if that was the issue. I only got another email thanking me for my interest in the company and to try again in a few months.

As I only had the technical interview, I was expending something like... "we need someone with more experience/knowledge in xxx", or "someone who has used xxx for xxx years". I did get the impression from the emails that there actually was no job available which was waiting to be filled, but they are constantly on the lookout - in the same was that job agencies sometimes post bogus jobs on job boards to get candidate information, and find out where gaps are in the job market.

I fail to see how applying again in a few months will change things as I'm not sure what went wrong, so will probably make the same mistake again, unless asked exactly the same questions.

Interview Questions

Topics: Filesystems, networking, scripting
I will not write the question

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Apr 2011 in Dublin, CA (took 1 week)

I was contacted by a recruiter asking if i am interested in working at google and scheduled a phone interview.first round is a recruiter screen with basic unix/linux commands which went well.second interview is more technical,it included topics from networking,Tcp/ip protocols,RAID etc,They would dig little deeper as you keep answering.It ended with a writing a program in language of your choice.I chose perl.
3rd phone screen was mostly into Data structures and algorithms which required coding in C or Java.
implementation of hash tables and binary trees etc and more of open ended questions.3rd interviewer was hurrying up and did not give much time to think because you fail to answer the first question correctly.Overall it was a good experience.

Interview Questions

Implement a hash table

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Jan 2010 in Mountain View, CA (took 4 months)

Protracted process from the recruiting team after initial contact. I went more than two months without a call back, followed by an offer to fly me out.

The engineering team doing technical interviews were very professional and personable and asked interesting questions. These centered around Linux knowledge and engineering background.

Interview Questions

A good example: "describe exactly what happens when you type 'telnet google.com 80' at a bash prompt, including shell interpretation, network connections".

View Answers (1)

Reason for Declining

Several reasons. Primarily, it was impressed upon me that people with no coding background are second-class citizens at Google. Other employees out of the interview process told me that people are overworked and underpaid. Lastly, I decided I'd rather not relocate.

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2010 (took a day)

The phone interview consists of: open questions, data structure, operating systems, network, and database.

Open questions:
1. why you choose google?
2. why you suit for google?

Data structure:
1. running time of quicksort algorithm
2. reverse a linked list
3. what's treemap and sortmap in Java

Operating system:
1. what's thread?
2. How to solve deadlock

Network:
1. what's TCP/IP
2. what's socket

Database:
1. what's transaction?

Interview Questions

3. what's treemap and sortmap in Java

View Answers (1)

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2009 in New York, NY (took 7+ weeks)

Interview process is very disorganized. Be prepared to have to shepherd it along yourself with follow up phone calls to ensure phone screens and whatnot actually take place. The on-site interview was actually pretty fun. Be sure you know your UNIX internals down cold. I'm actually surprised I wasn't offered the job, the interviews went fairly well. I suspect I was probably torpedoed in committee... I've been told that hiring decisions are made by arbitrarily chosen (volunteer driven) committees where applicants are regularly torpedoed for silly reasons or nitpicks on the part of one person on the committee.

Interview Questions

What happens when I type "ps" into a UNIX prompt?

Answer Question

How does RAID work?

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Apr 2010 in Dublin, County Dublin (Ireland) (took 2 weeks)

Got a call from internal staffing since I had applied a few years ago. Decided to have another try. The process was quite straightforward, a couple of short calls with staffing followed by an hour-long technical interview with an engineer by telephone. The interview involved working on an (initially blank) shared document to answer technical questions, coding problems, database queries etc.

Interview Questions

Write a function to return the most frequently occurring number in a list (the mode).

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2009 (took 2 weeks)

Unfortunately, I can't quote the actual questions, as I was asked not to do so. They caught me by asking questions about UNIX/Linux internals. The questions weren't that hard (believe me, you would totally answer them). It's just that I know what a particular UNIX command does, for example, but I don't know how this command operates "under the hood", on its lower levels.

Interview Questions

Describe Linux from its kernel level

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2008 in Dublin, County Dublin (Ireland) (took 2+ months)

I was contacted after participating in the Google Code Jam. The initial screening interview was conducted by somebody who was clearly not technical, and that was probably the only poor interview experience throughout the process. I was pressed to make a decision on location during that initial interview, which was a bit strange, since I would be moving from my home country to whichever location I picked.

The staff running the hiring process from then were always efficient and accomodating.

The initial phone screen process went quicker than I anticipated, with about an interview a week for around 4 or 5 weeks, and on-site interviews not long after that.

The interviews were all of a technical nature, with almost zero fluff. I found it hard to ask questions of the interviewers, because it seemed strange asking questions about the culture of the company after purely technical questions coming my way. All of the interviewers were very proficient and friendly, and even when I got things blatantly wrong I was made to feel good about the next questions coming up -- certainly a confidence booster.

The process was unfortunately ended sooner than it should have because of a hiring freeze.

I'd suggest anyone who thinks they might want to work for Google go through the process, even if you don't think you're up to scratch, there is no loss of confidence even if you're turned down! Because the interviews are so highly technical, be sure to have good programming theory and Unix knowledge. The interviews are weighted to your strengths, so be honest in your self assessments!