FYI, I didn’t pass.

I interviewed for an L4 Production Engineer (aka SRE) position. The interview process went smoothly and was probably the best I’ve experienced. A recruiter reached out, and after passing the initial phone call interview, they provided access to an internal interview portal.

This portal included everything from practice questions and review material to guides and more. While outside sources were still necessary (at least for me), it was a great start. They even allowed me to select and change my availability through the portal.

The first technical interview had two parts: a LeetCode-style interview and a troubleshooting exercise.

The LeetCode-style interview presented two questions. I’d categorize them as easy/medium, leaning more towards easy. For the first, I only wrote pseudocode and walked through it, and the interviewer said I didn’t have to code it. The same applied to the second question. When I noticed I was running out of time for the second question, I wrote it more as code than pseudocode, though not what I'd consider "actual" code. However, I felt like I passed (obviously, they don't tell you, so who knows).

The second part, the troubleshooting, is where I think I failed. I prepared, but it went differently than expected. The tl;dr; is that I wasn’t acting like an "owner" enough.

In summary, I was expecting them to say, "You’re seeing this issue, how would you tackle it?" Instead, it went like, "Here’s a system you now own, go."

I was supposed to find any issues. In this particular case, users were reporting problems in the forum section of this "website." There were no obvious errors in any of the system parts (CPU, RAM, HDD, etc.), so I said, "I’d leave it alone for now and wait for anything to change" (don’t touch it if it ain’t broken).

It was only later that I thought, "Okay, I guess I’ll poke around the site and see what I can find," that I discovered the user complaints.

I did find the issue but ran out of time before I could resolve it. So that’s why I feel I didn’t pass. Overall, it was a good experience; I will discuss what I learned and try harder (be less passive) next time.