Top 50 SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) Interview Questions & Answers 2025

The role of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is critical in modern tech organizations, ensuring system reliability, performance, and efficiency. This article covers the top 50 SRE interview questions & answers for 2025, helping candidates prepare for interviews by focusing on SRE Skills, SRE Interview Questions 2025, and SRE Practices.
General SRE Questions

1. What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)? SRE is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to IT operations to create scalable and reliable systems.
2. How does SRE differ from DevOps? SRE focuses on reliability using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, while DevOps emphasizes CI/CD and collaboration between Dev and Ops teams.
3. What are SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs? SLI (Service Level Indicator) measures system performance; SLO (Service Level Objective) sets a target for performance; SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a contract defining service expectations.
4. Explain the concept of Error Budgets. An error budget is the maximum allowable downtime before SLA violations occur. It balances innovation and reliability.
5. What are key metrics to measure system reliability? Availability, latency, throughput, error rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR). SRE Practices & Incident Management
6. How do you handle an incident in a production system? Follow the incident response process: detect, diagnose, mitigate, resolve, and postmortem.
7. What is a postmortem in SRE? A postmortem is a retrospective analysis of an incident to identify root causes and prevent recurrence.
8. How do you implement observability in an SRE environment? Using logs, metrics, and distributed tracing to monitor system health.
9. What is chaos engineering? A practice of proactively testing system resilience by introducing controlled failures.
10. What are some common monitoring tools in SRE? Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog, and New Relic. Infrastructure & Automation
11. What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)? Managing infrastructure using code-based configuration files, e.g., Terraform, Ansible.
12. How does Kubernetes help in site reliability? Kubernetes automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
13. Explain the role of CI/CD in SRE. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) automate software updates while maintaining reliability.
14. What is blue-green deployment? A technique that reduces downtime by maintaining two production environments, switching between them seamlessly.
15. How do you ensure system scalability? Through load balancing, caching, database sharding, and auto-scaling strategies. Performance & Reliability Engineering
16. How do you conduct a load test? Using tools like JMeter, Gatling, or k6 to simulate high traffic and measure performance.
17. What is capacity planning? Estimating system resource requirements to handle future demand.
18. How do you optimize database performance? Indexing, query optimization, caching, and sharding.
19. What is a circuit breaker pattern? A design pattern that prevents system overload by temporarily blocking failing services.
20. How do you reduce latency in distributed systems? Using caching, content delivery networks (CDNs), and database optimization. Security & Compliance in SRE
21. How do you handle security incidents? Following an incident response plan: detect, contain, eradicate, recover, and review.
22. What is least privilege access? Granting only necessary permissions to users or services to minimize security risks.
23. How do you implement secure logging practices? Avoid logging sensitive information, encrypt logs, and use centralized log management.
24. What is a DDoS attack, and how can SREs mitigate it? A distributed denial-of-service attack floods a system with traffic; mitigation includes rate limiting, firewalls, and CDNs.
25. How do compliance and regulatory requirements impact SRE practices? SREs must ensure data protection, audit logs, and security best practices align with compliance regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA). Advanced SRE Questions
26. How do you ensure high availability in a microservices architecture? Using redundancy, auto-scaling, and load balancing.
27. What are the challenges of managing multi-cloud environments? Networking complexity, cost optimization, security policies, and interoperability.
28. How do you handle long-running transactions in distributed systems? Using the Saga pattern or compensating transactions.
29. What is the CAP theorem? It states that a distributed system can only guarantee two out of three: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance.
30. What is the role of AI/ML in SRE? AI/ML can predict failures, automate anomaly detection, and optimize system performance. Behavioral & Scenario-Based Questions
31. Describe a time you resolved a major production incident.
32. How do you prioritize reliability vs. feature development?
33. Tell me about a situation where automation improved system performance.
34. How do you communicate complex technical issues to non-technical stakeholders?
35. Describe a time when you proactively prevented a major system failure. Conclusion Preparing for an SRE interview in 2025 requires a deep understanding of SRE Skills, SRE Practices, and real-world troubleshooting scenarios. This guide provides a solid foundation to tackle SRE Interview Questions 2025 confidently. Keep practicing, stay updated with the latest technologies, and embrace a reliability-first mindset to succeed in your SRE career