Senior SRE Engineer Interview Experience - Tallinn, Estonia
Process
I applied online. The process took 8 weeks.
RUN AS FAR AS U CAN. Interview process is extremely long like 6-8 weeks. Managers are completely incompetent, and never spend a day as DevOps or SRE, cover up all their own errors, cannot plan time and lie to HR about progress on your hiring pipeline, and provide false feedback, literally putting you in a situation of your word against theirs from day one. Toxic culture in teams.
They also completely ignore laws regarding on-call limits. Do not use blue-green/canary deployments, deploy everything straight to PROD and then solve everything there in a rush. Expect DBA level knowledge from SRE, and you will be the one who fixes devs' mistakes on PROD, running queries directly on PROD.
Salary range up to 6700EUR as per initial interview, but be prepared that if you reach the final stage the offer will be much LOWER than that. There are multiple reports about this. So they just lure you in and hope that after a 2-month process, you considering time spent will be willing to accept the offer.
They also miss their target to become profitable in 2025, and try to do an IPO in 2026, so everyone is under heavy pressure.
Questions
What autoscalers have you used?
How do you upgrade an AWS EKS cluster without downtime?
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Bolt Senior SRE Engineer role in Tallinn, Harju County.
Success Rate
Bolt's interview process for their Senior SRE Engineer roles in Tallinn, Harju County is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Bolt's Senior SRE Engineer interview process in Tallinn, Harju County.
Bolt Work Experiences
- 1.0Toxic SRE culture, incompetent management - avoid at all costsSenior SRE Engineer • Former EmployeeTallinnFebruary 21, 2026Pros: You can put it on your CV… that's about it.Cons: SRE management are incompetent. They are literally technically and morally useless, but they all look after each other like a boys' club. Bolt has a toxic, high-performance culture and frequently uses PIPs to get rid of people whom they don't like. We're talking about perfectly good engineers. Each subteam has an a-hole staff level who keeps all info to themselves and hampers the onboarding of new members. They used the IPO carrot on a stick to get people to join. Then, instead of doing layoffs, they decided to postpone their IPO and implement RTO on top of their PIP process to push people out. If you value your mental health, avoid this place. If you're on an employee-sponsored residency permit, be very careful. I've seen people strung along during their probation period and dropped at the last minute.
- 5.0Great place to work atSenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeTallinn, Harju County, EstoniaFebruary 24, 2024Pros: There are many things that I like about the company: * Great leadership and inspiring mission * Transparency * Big scale and challenging problems to solve * Opportunities for professional growth * Teammates you can learn from * Good compensationCons: There are no cons for me.
- 5.0Love the work environmentSenior Android Engineer • Current EmployeeTallinn, Harju County, EstoniaJuly 26, 2019Pros: High salaries, work-life balance, healthy snacks.Cons: Nothing major, processes are still forming.
Bolt Interview Questions
