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      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      Apr 1, 2020
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Sunnyvale, CA
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Mar 2020

      Interview

      Fairly standard interview process for these types of companies. An initial screening, followed by two rounds of phone interviews, and finally an on-site interview. The on-site interview had to be swapped for a virtual interview due to COVID-19. PROS: - The coding portions of the interview were all relevant to the job. They were not just toy examples. - The turnaround time after each interview was extremely quick - Most people were easy to talk to, which made each interview feel relatively quick - You set your own pace for the interview rounds. Some of my rounds were over a month apart. - The recruiters ask for your feedback to them after each round - The interviews were actually easier than I thought they'd be, except the last round I wasn't given as much guidance on what to study as the first two rounds, so I spent time on useless info. CONS: - The interview questions were more like a shotgun blast across a wide range of topics rather than focusing on anything in particular. It went from as low level as how/when shared libraries are loaded when starting an application to as high-level as designing video streaming service. - Before the final round, you are handed off to a different recruiter - Based on browsing this site, they seem to use the same questions for each candidate. It makes me feel like they are just a cog in the wheel with no real input to the process. With nothing being tailored to the candidate, it feels like they don't actually care about your strengths and weaknesses outside of their own perceptions. - The interviewers do not look at your own LinkedIn profile or resume until they are in the process of interviewing you. Therefore their questions against your background are either stock or ad-lib. There is little to suggest most interviewers care about your history or interests. - They count on their name a little too much to persuade you that its worth taking a hit to your salary and/or quality of living. Especially if you are relocating from a more affordable area. The benefits are not substantially different from my current employer. - Some disconnect between recruiters and interviewers, which is pretty common. For example, I repeatedly said this would be a change in both domain and roles for me, and I wasn't sure I'd be a good fit, even though I was interested and more than willing to learn. I do have extensive experience other tech domains. I was assured that there would be an extensive training process for the role, and the experience, while important, didn't matter quite as much as the ability and interest to learn the job. The feedback I received after the final interview indicated that experience was in fact one reason I didn't get the job; they wanted someone who could hit the ground running, even though the position was being held open indefinitely and there would be a training period after hire. - Feedback was almost non-existent after the last interview. Whereas I talked directly with the recruiter after every other round, the last round feedback was left as a voicemail. They did not solicit my feedback. TIP: Go through the second Google SRE book, the workbook.

      Interview questions [11]

      Question 1

      How do make a variable in a shell script available after the script exits (assume the shell script was sourced)?
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      How do you change the priority of a running process?
      1 Answer

      Question 3

      Coding test: Parse a (syslog) file to get various fields from the logs and message counts. Associate counts with the processes that logged them.
      Answer question

      Question 4

      Describe how SSH works.
      1 Answer

      Question 5

      Describe how curl works. What happens when you call the command? Describe the process of loading libraries, parsing arguments, DNS resolution, etc.
      Answer question

      Question 6

      You have Gigabytes of data that needs to periodically be synced from a producer to a large number of consumers. How do you approach it? Hint: the data set isn't necessarily entirely new each time it needs to be synced, so only sync the data that has changed.
      1 Answer

      Question 7

      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?
      Answer question

      Question 8

      You will be asked to role play a scenario where the number of registrations for a service has dropped to 0 for the past 6 or so hours, setting off an alert. You will have to go through an incident response and elevation. You will be asked to write simple reports that are suitable for giving high-level status to a manager.
      Answer question

      Question 9

      You will be shown several architecture diagrams and asked various questions, like "what happens when database X goes down?", or "How to speed up requests from service Y?". Caching plays a big role in almost all responses.
      Answer question

      Question 10

      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).
      Answer question

      Question 11

      You will have to perform a code review of several pieces of code. Focus on logic errors, not stylistic issues. I don't remember all the code samples, but one was about doing file backups, where they manually implemented extension parsing and copied over ".1" files to ".2", etc. without ensuring the order of the copy.
      Answer question
      38

      Other Site Reliability Engineer Interview Reviews for LinkedIn

      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      Jun 24, 2022
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Easy interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at LinkedIn in Jun 2022

      Interview

      There were two rounds 1.operation round 2.coding round both rounds were easy answered all questions which interviewer agreed are correct .still din't get feedback why i was rejected. They have standard questions which will be asked in every interview . I don't know how they are evaluating candidates.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Operations asked three questions 1.ssh how will it work 2.send one file from one server to 10,000 3.how to monitor three tier architecture coding 1.FizzBuzz 2.recursion 3.log parsing you can see answers here https://yumminhuang.github.io/note/sreinterview/
      Answer question
      3

      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      Apr 5, 2021
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      New Delhi
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (New Delhi) in Feb 2021

      Interview

      The Hiring process was long, lasted over a month. I had an initial Hacker Rank coding round, followed by first round of interview, then second round and then final round which consisted of 4 rounds of interview. I had referred previous interview experiences on Glassdoor and that helped to prepare. The questions were mostly similar. I got a rejection mail after the first round but then again I got a call for second round. They never answer when we call back. That's what I felt very bad about it.

      Interview questions [5]

      Question 1

      First round was based on Networking. TCP/IP, ARP, DNS resolution, Sharding, Scaling, caching, server management concepts were covered.
      Answer question

      Question 2

      Second round was scheduled only for Linux Memory management. Entire Memory management questions were asked. How it works, why is it required, Virtual memory, swap memory, swappiness and all.
      Answer question

      Question 3

      Code review round they gave 3 codes and I had to find bugs. 1 was for storing backup, 2nd was parsing logs and 3rd one I don't remember.
      Answer question

      Question 4

      System design was okay. They gave situations and asked how to design system in that scenario. We were allowed to ask questions to check if we were in tbe right track.
      Answer question

      Question 5

      The last one was Troubleshooting There was an Apache server and we had tk debug jt. It had 500 and 400 errors. I wasn't able to solve any in this round.
      Answer question
      13

      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      Mar 23, 2021
      Anonymous employee
      Bengaluru
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Bengaluru) in Jan 2021

      Interview

      The process started with an online coding challenge. It had three coding questions around LeetCode medium level, one DBMS query, and around 20 MCQs involving Networks, DBMS, Linux, etc. Following that, there were two technical interviews and one host manager round. The first technical interview was a Service Architecture round where I was asked to scale a ride-hailing application to handle about 10000 requests/min. It was a 1.5 hour round. In the second interview, I was tested a lot on Data Structures, Networking, Linux administration, troubleshooting. Certain questions were very tough, like in what port do you attach your hard drive, but I guess they asked that to check our limits, and they weren't deciding questions. The last round was a Hiring Manager round close to a typical HR round, but I had certain technical questions about my projects.

      Interview questions [2]

      Question 1

      Scale a ride-hailing application so that it handles ~10,000 requests/minute. This was a 1.5-hour-long discussion with follow-ups, including Consistent Hashing. They also challenged multiple of my design claims which I had to think about on the spot.
      Answer question

      Question 2

      Questions on DNS, Linux Inodes, Message Queues, Processes, Fork and VFork, Kernel, Linux Boot Process, etc.
      Answer question
      4

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