Hiring a Site Reliability Engineer?
Your team is hiring; I run the technical round for you. One 60-minute live interview per candidate, with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours.
About the role — Keeps production honest. Interviews badly if you only ask about tools.
What you get
A 60-minute live interview with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours. No retainer; fee quoted on the scoping call.
01 — Why this role is hard to assess
SRE candidates can recite the Google book without ever having set an SLO that someone pushed back on. The signal is in how they reason about error budgets when a product manager wants to ship anyway.
02 — What the 60 minutes covers
The specific ground, not a generic checklist.
- Setting an SLO for a service they have actually run, and defending the number
- What they do when the error budget is exhausted mid-quarter
- A postmortem they wrote, and what changed as a result
- Alert design: how they decide what is worth waking someone for
03 — A scenario from the round
Latency p99 has doubled over two weeks. No deploys correlate, no alerts fired, and the dashboards look normal. Where do you look, and what would make you stop looking there?
Scenarios rotate between candidates so the round stays fair, and none of the published examples are used verbatim.
What I listen for
Failure modes specific to this role
- Treats SLOs as a documentation exercise
- Cannot name an alert they deleted
- Describes postmortems as blameless without describing what changed
- Confuses monitoring coverage with observability
Scored on
- Reliability reasoning
- Alert discipline
- Incident method
- Data-driven argument
- Blameless culture in practice
Each dimension is scored with written rationale. You get the reasoning, not just the number.
Next step
Hiring a Site Reliability Engineer this quarter?
Fifteen minutes to agree the rubric, then I run the round. One candidate or twenty — there is no retainer and no minimum.