Brief
Applied: November 2020 through Linkedin (Easy Apply)
Rounds conducted:
- Hackerrank Online Test
- Technical Interview- I (SRE Operations)
- Technical Interview – II (Service Design & Architecture)
- Host Manager Round
Status: Accepted Offer ( January 2021)
Hackerrank Online Test: 14th December 2020 – 105 mins
26 MCQs ( Easy ) from:
- Operating Systems
- Computer Networks
- Unix/ Linux
- DBMS
2 DBMS Medium questions to write SQL Queries: 4 languages allowed (MySQL, oracle, tsql, db2)
2 programming questions (Easy) 24 languages allowed ( C, Clojure, CPP, CPP14, CPP20, CSharp, erlang, go, Haskell, java, java15, java8, javascript, kotlin, Lua, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, python, python3, ruby, scala, swift, typescript )
Technical Interview- I (SRE Operations): 7th January 2021 – 1 hour
- 2 Interviewers joined the zoom call. They started with their introduction, after which I followed with mine. The Interviewers were super friendly and made me feel comfortable during the introductions.
- I was asked about my strong points and the subjects taught in my college till now since the interview was going to be flexible enough and interviewers shall be focusing on those subjects more.
- The interview was very smooth and interactive. It had a general flow where they would first focus on a subject I was most comfortable with and then I was first asked some basic questions around that subject, followed by medium level questions and later some hard questions at depth.
- Thus, for me, they started with some questions from Operating Systems, followed by Databases, and lastly, some questions from Computer Networks since that was a subject yet to be taught in my curriculum. There were also some general questions around Linux Commands and Network Security Since, the interview was long, there were a lot of questions from every topic.
I can’t state exact questions here, but one should be prepared with all the basic topics from in and around Computer Science fundamentals.
Technical Interview – II (Service Design & Architecture): 7th January 2021 – 1.5 hours
- After the first technical round, I was given a 5-mins break during which 2 new interviewers joined the zoom call.
- The interview started in a similar fashion where they introduced themselves first, followed by my introduction. They mentioned that there were no right or wrong answers during this round.
- They first went through my resume and asked me to elaborate on the skills mentioned for how, when, and why I acquired them. Next, we discussed 3 out of 4 of the projects mentioned in my resume. There were questions around the choice of my frameworks and future scopes for my projects. Later, I was asked some questions about a particular project that interested them and was asked to design how I shall be building it at scale if I ever plan to implement it for the real world ( my project was just a prototype). I went on to draw a design of the architecture that best came up in my mind. Again, there were questions about my choices of components while drafting the design. I was able to come up with decent architecture by the end.
- I was also asked some questions about system design concepts and components. This was a very interactive round, but the interviewers were comforting enough to not make it intimidating for me.
I believe since these concepts are new to any college grad or student, interviewers try to be flexible enough to put the candidate through a process depending on the candidate which 1. the candidate is comfortable with 2. gives the interviewers a clear idea about the candidate’s understanding of systems, in general.
Host Manager Round(12th January 2021 – 50 mins): 1 interviewer ( Manager ) joined the call. This was a conversational round where the Manager tries to understand a few backgrounds about the candidate. There were no right or wrong answers during this round.
Some of the things that our conversation revolved around were:
- Choice of domains and technologies of interests
- Questions from the section of ” Roles of responsibility” from my resume
- My understanding of SRE and why the role interests me, etc
Resources to Prepare: I have listed down some of the resources I found relevant during my preparations. One might or might not require to go through all of them. Also, there are many other resources over the web that one can refer to.
Reads:
- School of SRE (https://linkedin.github.io/school-of-sre/)
- System Design Primer ( Database Section) (https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer#database)
- Grokking the System Design Interview Course
Videos:
- Gatesmasher (YT)
- Gaurav Sen – System Design ( YT Playlist )
- Edureka – Linux Commands ( YT videos )
- LetUsDevOps (YT)
- KnowledgeGate (YT)
- Common interview questions ( LI Learning )
School of SRE (https://linkedin.github.io/school-of-sre/)
School of SRE is an initiative by Linkedin SREs to train new hires at Linkedin. It is my primary resource to understand the SRE disciplines and practices required to be an SRE. It is an open-source project and anybody is free to contribute according to the set guidelines. It is also a useful and intuitive resource for anyone willing to start their career as SRE.
Tips
- Verbalize your thoughts to the interviewer.
- It’s ok to not know answers to some questions
- Make sure to convey your strong points.
- Have a learning attitude during the course of interviews.