google sre manager interview questions were not what i prepped for
i was expecting system design and a few team questions. didn’t get either. most of it was incidents.
one round was just a sev1 walkthrough. they didn’t give much detail, just said service is down, alerts are noisy, people are confused. asked what i’d do in the first 10 mins. then 30. then an hour. kept layering in stuff like conflicting dashboards or execs pinging directly.
another round asked how i’d coordinate a rollout if 4 teams were involved and one had a different alerting threshold. then they switched it to what if that team was in another region and didn’t reply in time.
last one was a behavioral question: someone on the team keeps skipping follow-through after incidents. how do you handle it without making it worse.
most of the google sre manager interview questions weren’t framed like questions. just situations. they want to see how you work when nothing’s clean.
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mine started with a sev where no one owned the dashboard and leadership was already in the loop. they asked what i'd say and who i'd bring in
had a scenario where alerts fired but the metrics looked fine. asked how i'd investigate without triggering more noise
they asked me how i’d split ownership across two teams who both say they don’t want to do oncall. not even technical. just messy
google sre questions are way more about coordination and accountability than they are about infra design
one of my rounds was about pushing back on a risky launch. follow up was what if eng disagreed and pager volume was already high