Google Site Reliability Engineer interview questions

Was contacted by recruiter on Linked In. Scheduled a phone call with the recruiter who asked me basic programming questions. I was then passed on to another recruiter who scheduled a technical phone interview. There are two tracks in SRE, programming and system administration. I interviewed through the programming side. During the technical interview I had to answer specific questions about queues, graphs, and distributed architecture. I have 12 years experience programming, managing people, products, and projects. They do not care about any of that stuff. At the phone stage of the interview, they are screening folks for technical knowledge and ability. All they care about is whether you know the methods and tricks to solve technical programming problems. Know your data structures. The interview process builds from simple to complex, based on your previous answers. If you really want to work at Google as an SRE, study algorithms, algorithm analysis, and memorize as many methods and tricks to solving programming problems as you can. Bonne chance!

Lots of coding on the whiteboard, very detailed and specific questions about Linux administration and low-level, core system functionality such as I/O buffering. There were also questions about security and safety of servers, including handling of logs. Be mindful of how you speak and avoid expressing strong opinions on what might or might not be a good idea -- Googlers work in an entirely different universe and may interpret you wrongly. I got a guy angry at me because I said external logging in a very high load webserver would be a very bad idea, given the additional I/O time. It was 2010 and I always had to make do with smallish servers and 100mbps ethernet; when you have a slashdotted website crawling to death you might even stop logging to the disk to keep your server online. Said Googler surely worked with huge datacenters and gigabit connections, and thought I was stupid. But all in all, the experience was nice.