Keep in mind (i) I was a referral from an N26 employee I have met through friends in common, (ii) I would also need to relocate to Berlin. Both things might have impacted my experience.

Screening interview

Talk about yourself, what you do, previous experience, responsibilities. Questions like: what is DevOps, what is SRE. I was asked about my salary expectation and openly talked about it.

Code assignment

Take-home style to be done in 3 business days. Assignment was super fun, interesting and relevant. I had a working solution, unit tests, and answered in writing all the questions they suggest for discussion.

(1st) Technical interview (Senior SRE)

Interviewer had 2 years at the company (1 year as SRE, 1 year as senior SRE). Questions were clearly scripted. Went through the code, got me to explain it briefly, covered the questions in the assignment Assessed my understanding of the problem I solved, and my understanding of the lower level. Higher level questions about TLS Monitoring, alerting, observability Incident response, postmortems

(2nd) Technical interview (Senior SRE, Tech Lead)

Interviewer had 6 months at the company, and was a Tech Lead Asked about DevOps vs SRE, I mentioned CI/CD Asked about CI vs CD, I mentioned confidence and release Asked about rollout strategies, I mentioned routing Asked about routing options, I mentioned service mesh and LB offloading features Asked about service mesh Asked about SSL offloading on the ELB Asked about encryption in private networks (wanted to hear about mTLS) Ran out of questions and repeated questions of previous interview

Lead SRE (interview)

I explicitly asked what was the position I was being considered for, and was informed not senior. Behavioral questions, questions to understand my current responsibilities. I put focus on what else I would bring to the company, rather than reinforcing I do what their definition of SRE currently is.

Feedback

I was a strong software engineer, and had delivered "one of the best solutions" according to one of the interviewers. They would not offer me a senior position was to set me up for success given there would be other expectations.

Offer and negotiation

I was offered a SRE position with a salary that was exactly 90% of my answer to the salary expectation. Grade and compensation were brought up as a concern, but they said I should not see it as a stepback bc of the relocation as an opportunity to grow. Performance and recognition was brought up as a concern, but they chose to do not comment on it. We could not find a balance between that could fit my individual situation as a candidate.

Bottomline

Senior SRE requires "good experience in working with products in a in-house product-focused company and have solid communication skills to drive change" There is little flexibility in hiring and the Lead SRE seems to be the decision maker. Hiring is disconnected from the job description for a SRE. I was not assessed on any of:

• Your brain runs Linux
• Strong interest in security related topics
• Working knowledge of protocols and standards like TCP, HTTP, UDP, DNS, TLS (you also know where they are in the OSI model)
• Ability to identify repeatable processes and automate them quickly
• Open mind and interest in providing a bleeding-edge infrastructure
• Desire to learn and improve

Advice

The two technical interviews are scripted and will likely overlap. Focus on the Lead SRE: important negotiation flexibility (if any) depends on them. Reiterate your experience in "doing" observability, incident response, post mortem, working on call, supporting product teams for e2e ownership. Don't focus on any subject that is on a higher level than delivering SRE.

Say you have joined a new team or company, how would you plan and implement monitoring?

What about alerting?

What is SRE? What is DevOps? (on every interview)

What happens at the network level when you talk to a DNS-over-TLS server?