Skip to contentSkip to footer
  • Community
  • Jobs
  • Companies
  • Salaries
  • For Employers
      Notifications

      Loading...

      Elevate your career

      Discover your earning potential, land dream jobs, and share work-life insights anonymously.

      employer cover photo
      employer logo
      employer logo

      LinkedIn

      Part of Microsoft

      Engaged Employer

      About
      Reviews
      Pay & benefits
      Jobs
      Interviews
      Interviews
      Related searches: LinkedIn reviews | LinkedIn jobs | LinkedIn salaries | LinkedIn benefits | LinkedIn conversations
      LinkedIn interviewsLinkedIn Site Reliability Engineer interviewsLinkedIn interview


      Glassdoor

      • About / Press
      • Awards
      • Blog
      • Research
      • Contact Us
      • Guides

      Employers

      • Free Employer Account
      • Employer Center
      • Employers Blog

      Information

      • Help
      • Guidelines
      • Terms of Use
      • Privacy & Ad Choices
      • Do Not Sell Or Share My Information
      • Cookie Consent Tool
      • Security

      Work With Us

      • Advertisers
      • Careers
      Download the App

      • Browse by:
      • Companies
      • Jobs
      • Locations
      • Communities
      • Recent Posts

      Copyright © 2008-2026. Glassdoor LLC. "Glassdoor," "Worklife Pro," "Bowls," and logo are proprietary trademarks of Glassdoor LLC.

      Followed companies

      Stay ahead in opportunities and insider tips by following your dream companies.

      Job searches

      Get personalized job recommendations and updates by starting your searches.

      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      Jul 15, 2014
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Mountain View, CA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Jul 2014

      Interview

      The initial communications were through a recruiter that works for LinkedIn. They contacted me about the job offer and we moved on to interviews. I interviewed with an engineer who did a very high-level asking of questions related to web architecture and how I would go about scaling X or Y. It was not very technical, although you were encouraged to speak your mind about technical topics. Based on the feedback received by that interview we moved on the another phone interview that was a programming interview. You were allowed to pick a language (I picked python) and they asked you 4 questions. Each question built on the other questions and it was a timed interview (60 minutes). The questions you were asked were taken straight out of CS 101 text books; given input, if input is divisible by 2 do X, if divisible by 6 do Y, if divisible by both do Z, else print something. Interestingly, because I haven't done any of these "simple" coding problems for upwards of 10 years, I found this portion of the interview the most difficult. For me it was difficult because these questions just are not what you come across in the real world. The majority of the code things I do today involve fixing bugs here and there and monkey patching code to make it work. Also, you typically have some context and foresight into a problem before you start coding. Being dropped a simple 1 + 2 question is nothing you'd ever encounter working in the real world; it's all academic as far as I'm concerned. I felt like I failed the programming interview, but surprisingly, I got a call back saying they wanted to do an on-site interview. They flew me out to Mountain View and I spent a full day with a number of their engineers going through what they called "modules". This is where it got interesting. I took special care to look at their culture. I noticed that the building is very quiet, there is not a lot of personal "schwag" hanging around people's areas. Not a lot of smiling engineers...curious. The modules included you having semi-technical one-on-one interviews with an engineer. There were some engineers that were VERY technical and weren't much interested in the chitchat that can happen where you talk about what you might currently be working on. The easiest module was the "lunch" module where you ...well...ate lunch, haha. I was expecting this to be a group thing though and instead it was just a you + 1 engineer who ate at the cafeteria. The engineer was the only one that I really "liked" after meeting them all, but still it was a one-to-one interaction. I was really hoping for a group effort. Throughout the WHOLE on-site interview process I got the sinking feeling that individuality trumps groups at LinkedIn. This bums me out because I currently operate in a fairly strong group position and if I am moving to a new position where I am more isolated, I really don't want that. Also, its so quiet. Creepy quiet. Like none of the engineers talk to each other. My current position there is ALWAYS something going on and a lot more background noise to remind you that "you're around people". I didn't get that feeling from LinkedIn. After the interview I just went back and cooled off in the hotel before my flight left the next day. Because of the 2 hour time difference, it was a good idea to plan for staying 3-ish days; 1 to get there, 1 to interview and 1 to leave.

      Interview questions [2]

      Question 1

      There were two and they both happened during the live-debugging portion of the interview. All of the live debugging questions revolved around a simple website that had something broken in it. You were to fix the brokenness to be able to move on to the next page. In total there were 4 questions, each getting progressively more difficult to debug. The first question was a simple permissions problem on a file being requested by the client. The ownership of the file (a blank text file) was too restrictive, so it was raising an error. You could verify this in the apache web logs. The second error was due to a permission problem too, however this time the file was hidden in a sub directory of the main web site. You could only determine this by looking at the apache configuration file to see that the shtml file was located somewhere else. After that, change the permissions to fix. The third was a head scratcher. The filename in question was raising a 500 error and showing urlencoded characters in the filename in the web log. Looking at the name of the file on disk though, showed nothing out of the ordinary. It turns out that the unicode representations for the characters in the file name are printed in the terminal as english ascii characters. The only way you can tell that this is the case is to open the file and do a search for the filename itself and see if it matches. For example, if the correct filename is called "challenge1.shtml" you can search for that exact string but NOT find the unicode version of it. Once you find the incorrect file name, delete it and type the correct file name (in this case "challenge3.shtml" into the file and the page works. The final question was a segfault occurring in apache. It resulted in no information being returned to the client. You could see this occurring in the apache web logs as well as the Chrome tools. The apache web logs noted that a core file was dumped. This challenge required that you know a little bit about gdb and C programming. Basically, you need to run the core dump through gdb. gdb /path/to/apache /path/to/core/dump It will spew out a lot of stuff. In particular, it mentions that there is something happening in an apache module; mod_rewrite or something...it doesnt really matter. The output also points to the C source file for that module which is, conveniently on disk. Open that file in vi and jump to the line number mentioned in the gdb output (line 1861 or something). There you will see that if the filename matches challenge4.shtml to SIGSEGV; there's your smoke gun. They dont ask you to fix the final challenge, only to explain what the strstr is doing. The error in question basically looks like this if (strstr($r->filename, "challenge4.shtml") != NULL) { SIGSEGV } Just point out to them that, yeah, it's segfaulting when I ask for that file.
      10 Answers

      Question 2

      There was a paper presented to you with a number of nagios alerts and you had to rate them in the order you would approach fixing them. For example, one of them was a production host being 100% offline. Another was an environment alert about an entire cab that was overheating. Another was the tablet vip being down, another was a load average for the main website being really high. There were also a number of them that were QPS (queries per sec) related and included several security related alerts like XSS QPS and failed logins QPS
      2 Answers
      77

      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

      Top companies for "Compensation and Benefits" near you

      avatar
      Amazon
      3.7★Compensation & Benefits
      avatar
      Google
      4.5★Compensation & Benefits
      avatar
      Meta
      4.6★Compensation & Benefits
      avatar
      Amazon Web Services
      3.9★Compensation & Benefits

      Bowls

      Get actionable career advice tailored to you by joining more bowls.

      Company Bowl sample

      Want the inside scoop on your own company?

      Check out your Company Bowl for anonymous work chats.