This course provides practice tests for Site Reliability Engineering interviews, covering the topics most frequently assessed in technical screens at product companies and MNCs.

A note on the explanations

Every question includes a detailed explanation of why the correct answer is correct, why the distractors are plausible, and what distinguishes an adequate answer from a strong one in an interview setting. This reflects my work as an interviewer: I conduct technical and mock interviews through platforms MNC clients. In my experience, candidates rarely fail because they don't know a definition — they fail on the distinctions.

Topics covered

• SLI, SLO and SLA — the distinctions between them, availability targets and their time costs, the relationship between internal objectives and contractual agreements, measurement placement, and why latency is measured at percentiles rather than averages

• Error budgets and burn rate — calculating budgets from objectives, error budget policy and its organisational purpose, burn rate as a leading indicator, and multi-window burn-rate alerting

• Toil and SRE principles — the defining characteristics of toil, the 50% guideline, the relationship between SRE, DevOps and Platform Engineering, and blameless postmortem practice

• Observability and Prometheus — the Four Golden Signals, the RED and USE methods, Prometheus metric types, PromQL fundamentals, histograms versus summaries, and cardinality considerations

Intended audience

Engineers preparing for Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps or Platform Engineering interviews. Cloud and DevOps engineers transitioning into SRE roles. Practising SREs assessing their readiness before interviewing. Familiarity with Linux and general web application architecture is assumed; prior SRE experience is not required.

Suggested approach

Attempt a test without preparation first. The pattern of incorrect answers is more informative than the score itself, and indicates where to focus. Reviewing the explanations for correctly answered questions is also recommended, as the reasoning is often more instructive than the outcome.

About the instructor

I am a Lead Site Reliability Engineer with over 14 years of experience in IT, currently responsible for a Tier-1 mobile platform serving millions of users at a global healthcare technology organization. My background includes regulated environments in banking and financial services. The material in these questions is drawn from production experience and from interviewing candidates for SRE roles.