Skip to content Strategic and Leadership Questions
Vision for SRE:
- How do you define the role of SRE in a medium-sized organization?
- What strategies would you use to balance reliability and velocity in a hybrid cloud/on-prem environment?
Scaling Practices:
- What challenges have you faced when scaling SRE teams, and how did you overcome them?
- How would you structure an SRE team to support both cloud-based and on-prem infrastructure?
Cultural Influence:
- How do you advocate for and implement a culture of reliability and operational excellence across an organization?
- What approaches do you use to foster collaboration between SREs, developers, and product teams?
Measuring Success:
- How do you define and measure the success of an SRE team?
- What key metrics do you focus on to track system reliability and team performance?
Technical Expertise and Problem Solving
Incident Management:
- Can you describe your approach to handling major incidents?
- How do you ensure proper post-incident reviews and follow-through on remediation?
On-Prem vs. Cloud:
- What unique challenges do you see in managing reliability for on-prem infrastructure compared to cloud services?
- How do you handle hybrid architectures and ensure consistent reliability across both environments?
- What tools or frameworks do you recommend for monitoring, alerting, and incident response? Why?
- How do you approach automation for repetitive tasks while ensuring safety and scalability?
Cost and Resource Management:
- How do you optimize costs while maintaining reliability in cloud and on-prem environments?
- Have you ever implemented cost-aware reliability strategies, such as rightsizing resources or optimizing cloud spend?
Team Management and Development
Hiring and Building Teams:
- What qualities do you look for when hiring SREs, and how do you assess those qualities during interviews?
- How would you go about building an SRE team from scratch or evolving an existing one?
Training and Development:
- How do you ensure that your team stays up-to-date with the latest technologies and practices?
- What kind of learning and development programs have you implemented for SREs?
Conflict Resolution:
- How do you resolve conflicts between SRE and development teams when priorities or objectives clash?
Process and Practices
Service Level Management:
- How do you approach setting and enforcing SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs?
- Can you share an example where you had to revise SLAs to meet business needs?
Disaster Recovery and Resilience:
- What is your approach to disaster recovery planning for both cloud and on-prem systems?
- How do you test the resilience of critical systems?
Security and Compliance:
- How do you incorporate security into your SRE practices?
- What strategies do you use to ensure compliance with industry standards while maintaining reliability?
Behavioral Questions
Handling Challenges:
- Can you describe a time when a production outage had a significant impact on the business? How did you and your team handle it?
Cross-Functional Collaboration:
- Share an example of how you worked with product, engineering, or leadership teams to achieve a balance between reliability and innovation.
Driving Change:
- Tell me about a situation where you had to introduce a significant change to improve reliability or scalability. How did you manage resistance?
Closing Questions
Future Thinking:
- What emerging trends in SRE do you believe will have the most impact on hybrid cloud/on-prem environments in the next 3-5 years?
Impact:
- How do you see the role of Director of SRE contributing to the company’s overall goals and success?
Custom Queries:
- Do you have any questions about the challenges or opportunities within our organization?