Skip to contentSkip to footer
  • Community
  • Jobs
  • Companies
  • Salaries
  • For employers
      Notifications

      Loading...

      Elevate your career

      Discover your earning potential, land dream jobs, and share work-life insights anonymously.

      employer cover photo
      employer logo
      employer logo

      Google

      Engaged employer

      About
      Reviews
      Pay and benefits
      Jobs
      Interviews
      Interviews
      Related searches: Google reviews | Google jobs | Google salaries | Google benefits
      Google interviewsGoogle Site Reliability Engineer interviewsGoogle interview


      Glassdoor

      • About / Press
      • Awards
      • Blog
      • Research
      • Contact Us
      • Guides

      Employers

      • Free Employer Account
      • Employer Centre
      • Employers Blog

      Information

      • Help
      • Guidelines
      • Terms of Use
      • Privacy and Ad Choices
      • Do Not Sell Or Share My Information
      • Cookie Consent Tool
      • Security

      Work With Us

      • Advertisers
      • Careers
      Download the App

      • Browse by:
      • Companies
      • Jobs
      • Locations
      • Communities
      • Recent posts

      Copyright © 2008-2026. Glassdoor LLC. "Glassdoor," "Worklife Pro," "Bowls" and logo are proprietary trademarks of Glassdoor LLC.

      Company Bowl sample

      Want the inside scoop on your own company?

      Check out your Company Bowl for anonymous work chats.

      Bowls

      Get actionable career advice tailored to you by joining more bowls.

      Followed companies

      Stay ahead in opportunities and insider tips by following your dream companies.

      Job searches

      Get personalised job recommendations and updates by starting your searches.

      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      16 Dec 2015
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Dublin, Dublin
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Google (Dublin, Dublin) in Dec 2015

      Interview

      I had one phone screen with a recruiter, one phone interview with an engineer and 5 on-site interviews. I initially got contacted by a recruiter because I had another series of interviews with Google previously. After some discussion I've decided to apply again for an SRE job. I cannot disclose the interview questions, but I will give some general information about the process. I had one phone screen with the recruiter where I was asked 10-15 questions with short answers. The questions covered different areas that are of interest for an SRE job. For instance, data structures, algorithms, systems, Linux basics and commands and network protocols. One day after the phone screen I got invited for a phone interview with an engineer. During the phone interview I had a programming challenge to solve. The initial challenge started simple and as I solved it the interviewer extended the question and made it more difficult. This seems to be the common way of conducting a programming interview at Google. I solved the questions by writing code in Google Docs. 4-5 days after the interview the recruiter contacted me again and said that I am invited for a round of onsite interviews. The trip was arranged by Google and I had 5-6 hours to spend at Google's office, including lunch. During this time I had 5 interviews with engineers, each about 45 minutes. Since I had a software engineering background, I had 3 software/programming and 2 SRE-specific interviews. Before the lunch, I had the 3 programming interviews. These were similar to the phone interview, only difference is that you need to write code on the white board instead of Google Docs. There were no behavioral questions, and only a very short CV-related question. The rest was all about algorithms and programming. In these interviews you need a good grasp at data structures (arrays, linked lists, trees, hash tables, etc.), various algorithms (string processing, bit manipulation, graphs, etc), runtime complexity of these and your programming language. It is important to ask questions to clarify problems, explain your thought process, find efficient algorithms and write clean code. After the third interview, I had lunch with an engineer. This is an informal chat and no feedback is given to the hiring committee. So it is a good time to relax and ask honest questions about the job. After the lunch, I had SRE-specific interviews. The first one was about troubleshooting. The interview gives a short background of a hypothetical production problem and asks you to find the root cause of the problem. It goes interactively where you say "I will check x in y" and the response is "It turns out x is too high". The important part is your thought process and knowledge of common failures in systems. Knowing what to monitor and how to do it is very valuable. Last interview was called "Non Abstract Large Scale System Design" interview. Here, the interviewer describes a real or hypothetical large system and asks you to design it. You start with architecture and also discuss trade-offs and make decisions. It is important to also do capacity planning for the system since it is "non abstract". For instance how much storage you need, how many data centers, how many servers, how much bandwidth, etc. This was a quite interesting and useful experience. I don't know the outcome of the interviews at the moment, I will update when I get a response (which could take a few weeks).

      Interview questions [2]

      Question 1

      Troubleshoot a production incident
      Answer question

      Question 2

      Design the architecture of a system and plan capacity for it
      Answer question
      10

      Other Site Reliability Engineer interview reviews for Google

      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      2 Mar 2026
      Anonymous employee
      Waterloo, ON
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Google (Waterloo, ON)

      Interview

      HR round after applying, then coding screening round, if passes, then final round which consists of four coding round or three coding and one design round. Problem difficulty medium to hard.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Complexity of the solution I provided.
      Answer question

      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      11 Apr 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Zürich
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google (Zürich) in Mar 2026

      Interview

      Frist had one roughly 20 to 30 minutes screening call with a recruiter, then had one online 45 minutes technical interview with a Google Site Reliability Engineer. The technical interview covered data structure and algorithm topics.

      Site Reliability Engineer Interview

      7 Apr 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Dublin, Dublin
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google (Dublin, Dublin) in Mar 2026

      Interview

      The interview lasted 45 minutes and was conducted one-on-one. I was required to walk through my thought process before coding and then implement an optimized solution with a focus on time complexity.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      They asked me a string based question
      Answer question