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Site Reliability Engineering COURSE
Nail Your
Site Reliability/DevOps Engineering Interview
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Designed and taught by FAANG+ engineers, this course covers everything you need to learn to crack the toughest SRE & Devops interviews at FAANG+ companies.
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Get all the information about the course and pricing in our live webinar with Q&A.
Students who chose to uplevel with IK got placed at
Vinayak Prabhu
System Development Engineer
Pratik Agarwal
Software Development Engineer ll
Kishore Periassamy
Software Development Engineer
Anshul Bansal
Software Engineer
Suat Mercan
Senior Software Engineer
Kelsi Lakey
Software Engineer
Shrey Shrivastava
Software Development Engineer ll
Aniruddha Tekade
Senior Software Engineer
Best suited for
Current SREs, DevOps Engineers who want to uplevel into FAANG+ companies
System/Linux/Cloud admins (with coding experience) who want to uplevel into FAANG+ companies
Software Engineers with a passion for troubleshooting systems and automating large-scale operations
Why choose this course?
Program designed by FAANG+ leads
Covering data structures, algorithms, interview-relevant topics, and career coaching
Individualized teaching and 1:1 help
Technical coaching, homework assistance, solutions discussion, and individual session
Mock interviews with Silicon Valley engineers
Live interview practice in real-life simulated environments with FAANG and top-tier interviewers
Personalized feedback
Constructive, structured, and actionable insights for improved interview performance
Career skills development
Resume building, LinkedIn profile optimization, personal branding, and live behavioral workshops
50% Money-Back Guarantee*
If you do well in our course but still don't land a domain-relevant job within the post-program support period, we'll refund 50% of the tuition you paid for the course.*
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Meet your instructors
Our highly experienced instructors are active hiring managers and employees at FAANG+ companies and know exactly what it takes to ace tech and managerial interviews.
Zhuang Liang
Director Of Engineering
15+ years experience
Learn more
Wolfgang Kandek
SVP Site Reliability Engineering
15+ years experience
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Daniel Phelps
Site Reliability Engineer
10+ years experience
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Michael Martinez
Site Reliability Engineer
15+ years experience
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A typical week at Interview Kickstart
This is how we make your interview prep structured and organized. Our learners spend 10-12 hours each week on this course.
Site Reliability Engineering Course details and curriculum
Data structures and Algorithms
5 weeks
5 live classes
1
Sorting
- Introduction to Sorting
- Basics of Asymptotic Analysis and Worst Case & Average Case Analysis
- Different Sorting Algorithms and their comparison
- Algorithm paradigms like Divide & Conquer, Decrease & Conquer, Transform & Conquer
- Presorting
- Extensions of Merge Sort, Quick Sort, Heap Sort
- Common sorting-related coding interview problems
2
Recursion
- Recursion as a Lazy Manager's Strategy
- Recursive Mathematical Functions
- Combinatorial Enumeration
- Backtracking
- Exhaustive Enumeration & General Template
- Common recursion- and backtracking-related coding interview problems
3
Trees
- Dictionaries & Sets, Hash Tables
- Modeling data as Binary Trees and Binary Search Tree and performing different operations over them
- Tree Traversals and Constructions
- BFS Coding Patterns
- DFS Coding Patterns
- Tree Construction from its traversals
- Common trees-related coding interview problems
4
Graphs
- Overview of Graphs
- Problem definition of the 7 Bridges of Konigsberg and its connection with Graph theory
- What is a graph, and when do you model a problem as a Graph?
- How to store a Graph in memory (Adjacency Lists, Adjacency Matrices, Adjacency Maps)
- Graphs traversal: BFS and DFS, BFS Tree, DFS stack-based implementation
- A general template to solve any problems modeled as Graphs
- Graphs in Interviews
- Common graphs-related coding interview problems
5
Dynamic Programming
- Dynamic Programming Introduction
- Modeling problems as recursive mathematical functions
- Detecting overlapping subproblems
- Top-down Memorization
- Bottom-up Tabulation
- Optimizing Bottom-up Tabulation
- Common DP-related coding interview problems
System Design
3 weeks
3 live classes
1
Online Processing Systems
- The client-server model of Online processing
- Top-down steps for system design interview
- Depth and breadth analysis
- Cryptographic hash function
- Network Protocols, Web Server, Hash Index
- Scaling
- Performance Metrics of a Scalable System
- SLOs and SLAs
- Proxy: Reverse and Forward
- Load balancing
- CAP Theorem
- Content Distribution Networks
- Cache
- Sharding
- Consistent Hashing
- Storage
- Case Studies: URL Shortener, Instagram, Uber, Twitter, Messaging/Chat Services
2
Batch Processing Systems
- Inverted Index
- External Sort Merge
- K-way External Sort-Merge
- Distributed File System
- Map-reduce Framework
- Distributed Sorting
- Case Studies: Search Engine, Graph Processor, Typeahead Suggestions, Recommendation Systems
3
Stream Processing Systems
- Case Studies: on APM, Social Connections, Netflix, Google Maps, Trending Topics, YouTube
Site Reliability Engineering/DevOps
6 weeks
6 live classes
1
Linux and Networking
- Memory management in Linux: Deep dive into physical and virtual memory. How kernel interacts with memory? What happens in case of page fault? How to deal with dirty pages?
- Handling memory issues:
- Getting alerted on DIMM chip failures
- Keeping track of used memory
- Preparing for OOM events
- Getting alerted on memory issues
- Discussion on critical interview questions:
- What is thrashing?
- What kind of memory pages will thrash depending on whether you have swap enabled or not?
- How do you tell if a host is computationally-bound or I/O bound?
- Deep dive into CPU and processes: Metrics to track CPU performance. Why disk I/O is important?
- Crack bash scripting questions: Learn pro tips and trick questions
- Get efficient with command line: Pro tips on pipes, Tmux, nc, and file redirection
2
Containers and Orchestration
- Comprehensive coverage of Docker and Kubernetes architecture: Learn how to perform a live upgrade of an application with zero downtime
- Deep dive into k8s: Horizontal Scaling, Load Balancing, Crash Protection, Tiered Networking, Resource Control, and Optimization and Security
- How to approach common interview questions such as:
- Usage of Docker volume for persisting data
- How to evaluate systems’ tolerance for failures/outages?
- What are the different techniques to scale a relational database?
- Application deployment: Local vs. Managed k8s
- Kubernetes patterns for designing web applications: Sidecar pattern, Ambassador pattern, etc.
- Important questions and pro tips on troubleshooting Kubernetes
- How to set customer expectations? Deep dive into Service-Level Objectives and Service-Level Indicators
3
Deployment & Configuration Management
- A top-down view of modern software release: In-depth understanding of how CI/CD works (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment). How automation helps achieve CI/CD?
- Deep dive into Jenkins: Installation and configuration, Jenkins Plugins, Blue Ocean & Jenkinsfile, and managing and scaling Jenkins
- Comprehensive coverage of critical interview questions:
- Jenkins user authentication and security measures?
- What happens when the underlying node of a particular job is offline?
- Best practices and pro tips in Jenkins node allocation
- How to design a system responsible for continuous integration and deployment?
- Comprehensive coverage of configuration management: Compare different tools available in the market, their advantages and features
- Infrastructure as code: Why, when, how?
4
Non-Abstract Large System Design
- How to design large-scale distributed systems like Google Adwords. Deep dive into the architecture, building blocks of scalable systems, scalability, and reliability
- Interesting follow-up questions on the fundamentals of modern software systems: Servers, agents, load balancer, Storage, indexer, consensus, pipeline, queues, sharding, replication, caching, batching, and scatter-gather
- Deep-dive discussion of SRE-specific interview questions:
- How do SLOs (service-level objectives) impact designs?
- How to do capacity estimates?
- How to design for fault tolerance?
5
Monitoring & Troubleshooting
- Monitoring and alerting: Key metrics and four golden signals (errors, saturation, latency, and traffic)
- Derive SLO of a system from SLI and learn how to implement a proactive SLO for an application for alerting purposes
- Deep dive into Prometheus, an open-source monitoring tool
- Questions on logging and log management:
- How to manage logs for various use cases? How to budget for long-term log storage?
- Design a logging framework for an organization: Depth of logging, retention, access and audit controls, and encryption
- Incident management: Lifecycle of an incident, KPIs like MTTD, MTTI and MTTR, and pro tips for incident management process
- Testing for failure: Understand the importance of Smoke tests, Stress tests, Perf tests, etc.
- Various troubleshooting scenarios and strategies: Leverage utilities like top, vmstat, iostat, mpstat, netstat, ping, sar, tcpdump, traceroute, dig, nslookup, etc.
6
Cloud Computing & AWS Services
- AWS Compute Services (EC2, EKS, Lambda)
- AWS Storage and Database Services (S3, RDS, Aurora, Dynamo and ElastiCache)
- AWS Management and Governance services (CloudWatch, CloudFormation)
- Networking Architecture
Career Coaching
3 weeks
3 live classes
1
Interview Preparation
2
Resume & LinkedIn Masterclass
3
Salary Negotiation Masterclass
Support Period
6 months
1
15 mock interviews
2
Take classes you missed/retake classes/tests
3
1:1 technical/career coaching
3
Interview strategy and salary negotiation support
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Practice and track progress on UpLevel
UpLevel will be your all-in-one learning platform to get you FAANG-ready, with 10,000+ interview questions, timed tests, videos, mock interviews suite, and more.
Mock interviews suite
On-demand timed tests
In-browser online judge
10,000 interview questions
100,000 hours of video explanations
Class schedules & activity alerts
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Real-time progress update
11 programming languages
Get upto 15 mock interviews withhiring managers
What makes our mock Interviews the best:
Hiring managers from Tier-1 companies like Google & Apple
Interview with the best. No one will prepare you better!
Domain-specific Interviews
Practice for your target domain - Site Reliability Engineering
Detailed personalized feedback
Identify and work on your improvement areas
Transparent, non-anonymous interviews
Get the most realistic experience possible
More about mock interviews
Career impact
Our engineers land high-paying and rewarding offers from the biggest tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, and Netflix.
Chun Wu
Senior Software Engineer
Placed at:
I joined iK after stumbling across it while reviewing some other interview prep materials after doing poorly in an interview at Linkedin. I knew that doing well in these interviews would require dedication and investment of my time - but with so many resources online I didn't have structure. This is what the IK platform provided me.
Shrey Shrivastava
Software development Engineer ll
Placed at:
The Interview Kickstart course is very structured and informative. They teach you about DS and algo fundamentals very thoroughly and also prepare you for the software engineering interview. I really like the live classes by FAANG engineers, and the homework and tests definitely help you toprepare for a real interview. If you have been looking for a bootcamp that prepares you for software engineering interviews, I would say this is definitely the right place to do it.
Sridhar Gandham
Senior Software Engineer
Placed at:
My experience at IK was extremely positive. I was preparing for FAANG companies using the standard techniques that you find on the internet. When I started preparing, there was no structure to the madness. For example, a simple quicksort can be implemented in multiple ways. So solving a medium problem would take me about 30 minutes. The biggest benefit that I got from IK was a clear, structured way of solving problems. After IK, I could solve medium problems in 10 minutes!
Suat Mercan
Senior Software Engineer
Placed at:
IK’s back-end engineering program helped me learn helpful nuances in programming and understandthe fundamentals of system design. The instructors from FAANG companies were inspiring. The mock interviews are also very helpful to get exposed to interviewing experience.
How to enroll for the SRE Interview Course?
Learn more about Interview Kickstart and the SRE Interview course by joining the free webinar hosted by Ryan Valles, co-founder of Interview Kickstart.
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A Free Guide to Kickstart Your SRE Career at FAANG+
From the interview process and career path to interview questions and salary details — learn everything you need to know about Site Reliability Engineering careers at top tech companies.
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Interview Strategy and Success
Interview Questions
Career Path
Salary and Levels at FAANG
Frequently Asked Questions
Site Reliability Engineering Interview Process Outline
The interview process at FAANG+ and other Tier-1 companies for Site Reliability Engineering interviews vary a bit for each company. However, the general structure is as follows:
- Initial screening: This usually involves a DSA coding question (easy/medium Leetcode questions) and some questions from the system’s domain like Linux, networking, etc.
- On-site: 4-6 on-site rounds, which include 1-2 coding rounds, 2 SRE fundamentals rounds, a system design round, usually for senior engineers, and a behavioral round.
IK’s Site Reliability Engineering course will cover all you need to know to nail these rounds.
What to Expect at Site Reliability Engineering Interviews
Initial technical Screening: This usually involves a DSA coding question (only easy/medium LC Questions) and some questions from the systems domain like Linux, Networking, etc.
On-site: The on-site interview includes 4-6 rounds. They are:
1
1-2 rounds of coding
Depending on the total years of experience, candidates go through 1-2 coding (DSA-based) rounds. Usually, the difficulty level of these questions is Leet code easy/medium.
2
2 rounds of SRE Fundamentals: They test the knowledge of:
- Unix/Linux Systems (System Calls, File-Systems, Kernel, etc.)
- Networking (HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP, the OSI Model, Subnetting, and Load Balancing strategies)
- Container-Orchestration Systems, Configuration Management (Infrastructure as code), CI/CD
- Monitoring, Analyzing, and Troubleshooting Systems. Some companies conduct separate troubleshooting rounds wherein candidates are given a broken system and expected to rectify it.
3
System design round (usually for senior folks)
In this round, they test the knowledge of designing Scalable Systems focused on the SRE domain - designing and deploying Microservices with health checks/monitoring. Scalable system design requires:
- A good understanding of DNS, Load balancing, Micro-service architecture, CAP theorem, Consistency patterns, Availability patterns, Databases, Caching, A synchronism patterns, etc.
- Ability to identify the architecture bottlenecks and to dimension the architecture with an appropriate number of machines, with some "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, whilst being robust and failure tolerant.
4
Behavioral round
In this round, you can expect questions related to:
- Teamwork
- Job performance
- Intelligence & capacity for learning
- Time management
- Communication skills
- Leadership
Check our article on the Google SRE interview process for more information.
Site Reliability Engineering Interview Questions
Let us check some interview questions for Site Reliability Engineers to gauge your interview preparation. We’ll look at Site Reliability Engineer interview questions on coding, system design, domain knowledge, and behavioral skills.
1
Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions on Coding and System Design
Find the single element that does not appear thrice in a given array of integers
For a given number, find the number of ones in its binary representation. Given nums=[0, 1, 3] return 2
How would you test for a loop in a linked list?
Write code to perform a level order search in a binary tree
Can you use Union in Structure?
Differentiate between bubble sort and quicksort
Reverse a string without using any built-in functions.
Create a technical design of an automated parking solution.
Build a service to handle hundreds of transactions to be executed at specific times of the day.
Design Google Drive.
Design a code deployment software.
Design Whatsapp.
2
Domain-specific Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions
What are the typical architectures that organizations follow for distributed systems/applications?
What strategy would you use to implement Capacity management?
How does latency affect the throughput of TCP sessions?
Explain readiness and liveness probe. Also, explain three different ways of implementing the health probes.
How do we scale Jenkins for large organizations with a large number of builds & deployments happening every minute?
What is Kernel, and can we modify it?
Your manager approaches you, explaining that the logging solution your company pays a monthly subscription for is getting too expensive, and you need to reduce the storage footprint. How can you approach this problem from the bottom up to ensure you are minimizing the cost of storage while maximizing the effectiveness of your logs?
3
Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions on Behavioral Skills
Why our company and why this role? Which of our company’s principles is your greatest strength?
Describe your most complex project.
How would you prioritize work and tasks in a program? Tell me about a time when you had to deal with competing priorities.
Describe a conflict you had with your manager or team member. How did you solve it?
If stakeholders want one thing done one way, but you don't think that is the right way to do it, how do you move forward?
How would you handle dependencies in cross-functional teams? How do you communicate with other teams?
Talk about your greatest professional accomplishment.
How would you approach a situation where a team member works less than their full potential?
Describe a stressful or challenging work experience you had and how you handled it.
What experience do you have related to this SRE position?
What are your career goals?
What do you think is the most important responsibility of a Site Reliability Engineer?
Site Reliability Engineering Career
Site reliability is crucial in these competitive times. For companies like Amazon, the IT downtime per minute costs thousands of dollars, if not millions. It's no surprise that SREs are paid so well. Let's take a look at the SRE job description to get a better idea of what the role entails.
1
Site Reliability Engineering Job Roles and Responsibilities
Site reliability engineer job qualifications include:
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or relevant experience
Experience in coding/automating processes in at least one of these languages - Shell, Go, Python, Scala, Ruby
Ability to produce tools to assist the product development teams. Experience with at least one large-scale web application and at least one Cloud provider
Working knowledge of modern software deployment processes, including CI/CD
Working experience with either Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation templating
Database experience (SQL, NoSQL, etc.) and experience in networking and security.
Hands-on experience in Linux administration and troubleshooting. Experience managing, deploying, and troubleshooting large-scale environments
Strong interpersonal skills - interacts well within the team and across other teams and with users, fast learner, ability to think on your feet
2
Day-to-day Site Reliability Engineer job description includes:
Deliver tools/software to improve the reliability and scalability of services.
Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services from inception and design through deployment, operation, and refinement.
Support services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning, and launch reviews.
Maintain services once they are live/running by measuring and monitoring availability, latency, and overall system health.
Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.
Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems.
3
Career Roadmap for a Site Reliability Engineer
In a FAANG+ company, the career progression for the SRE role is:
Profile name
Level
Site Reliability Engineer
L3
Site Reliability Engineer
L4
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
L5
Staff SRE or Tech Lead/EM
L6
Senior Staff SRE or EM/Director
L7
Site Reliability Engineering Salary and Levels at FAANG+ Companies
We’ve curated FAANG+ Site Reliability Engineer salary data by level for your convenience:
Facebook Site Reliability Engineer Salary
The typical Meta Site Reliability Engineer’s salary is $1,67,452 per year. Site Reliability Engineer salaries at Meta can range from $90,354 to $1,88,395 per year.
When factoring in bonuses and additional compensation, a Site Reliability Engineer at Meta can expect to make an average total pay of $1,67,452 per year.
Site Reliability Engineer salary at Facebook
Average compensation by level
Level name
Total
Base
Stock (/yr)
Bonus
E3
$181K
$127K
$42K
$12K
E4
$258K
$162K
$77K
$22K
E6
$513K
$211K
$270K
$32K
E7
$712K
$238K
$425K
$48K
E8
$777K
$270K
$440K
$67K
Apple Site Reliability Engineer Salary
The average base salary for an Apple SRE is $145,145.
Site Reliability Engineer salary at Apple
Average compensation by level
Level name
Total
Base
Stock (/yr)
Bonus
ICT3
$200K
$140K
$51K
$10K
ICT4
$327K
$191K
$109K
$27K
ICT5
$563K
$230K
$286K
$48K
Netflix Site Reliability Engineer Salary
The average salary for Product Reliability Engineer IV at companies like NETFLIX in the US is $164,390, but the range typically falls between $151,180 and $178,280.
Site Reliability Engineer salary at Netflix
Average compensation by level
Level name
Total
Base
Stock (/yr)
Bonus
Sr. SW. Engineer
$305K
$275K
$14K
$13K
Google Site Reliability Engineer Salary
The average base salary for an Amazon SRE is $155,377.
Site Reliability Engineer salary at Google
Average compensation by level
Level name
Total
Base
Stock (/yr)
Bonus
L3
$203K
$141K
$37K
$25K
L4
$282K
$165K
$85K
$32K
L5
$377K
$192K
$143K
$42K
L6
$470K
$219K
$203K
$48K
According to payscale.com, a Site Reliability Engineer’s salary is anywhere between $76,000 to $158,000 a year in the US, with the average salary being $117,768 per year. Let us look at Site Reliability Engineering salary associated with different locations, years of experience, etc.
The average annual Site Reliability Engineer salary based on location:
- Boston, MA — $142,458;
- New York, NY — $156,971;
- San Francisco, CA — $163,479
The average annual Site Reliability Engineer salary based on experience:
- Entry-level Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with less than 1 year experience - $82,637 (includes tips, bonus, and overtime pay)
- Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 1-4 years of experience - $104,679
- Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 5-9 years of experience - $121,310
- Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 10-19 years of experience - $134,942
- Senior Site Reliability Engineers with 20+ years of experience - $138,451
You can learn more about more related topics on our companies page.
FAQs on Site Reliability Engineer Interview Course
1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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