MY SRE Task - must check
SRE ROLE
Here is a strong interview preparation plan tailored exactly for this JD — which focuses on SRE leadership, DevOps, microservices, cloud architecture, compliance (FedRAMP/PCI-DSS), incident response, and hybrid infra.
This plan covers: 🔹 Technical preparation 🔹 Leadership & behavioral prep 🔹 Architecture deep dives 🔹 Compliance-specific topics 🔹 Mock questions 🔹 7-day study schedule
✅ 1. Core Technical Topics to Prepare
1.1 High Availability & Reliability (SRE Core)
SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets (Google SRE model)
Reliability vs Feature Velocity
Load balancing strategies (L7 vs L4, global LB, GSLB)
Autoscaling (HPA, VPA, Cluster Autoscaler)
Multi-region/failover architectures
Traffic shaping & blue/green/canary deployments
Must prepare:
How you improved system reliability
How you calculated/implemented SLOs
Examples of reducing MTTR, improving MTBF
1.2 FedRAMP & Security/Compliance
Since the JD mentions:
FedRAMP
PCI-DSS
Security standards
Prepare:
FedRAMP topics:
SSP (System Security Plan)
Boundary definition
Shared responsibility model
Logging, SIEM, Audit readiness
POA&M management
Controls: AC, AU, CM, IR, RA, SC, SI
FedRAMP High vs Moderate differences
Pen testing requirements
PCI-DSS topics:
Network segmentation
Cardholder Data Environment (CDE)
Logging, MFA, key rotation
Vulnerability management
Least privilege & RBAC
👉 Prepare 2–3 real experiences implementing compliance controls.
1.3 Cloud Architecture & Microservices Migration
The JD mentions:
Architected and migrated complex systems from monolith to microservices.
Prepare:
12-factor app principles
Domain-driven design
Service mesh (Istio/Linkerd)
API gateway patterns
Event-driven architecture (Kafka/PubSub/SQS)
Data migration strategies (dual write, CDC, toggle switches)
Zero downtime migration
Observability across microservices
1.4 DevOps & CI/CD Excellence
They want someone who executed DevOps practices.
Prepare:
GitOps (ArgoCD/FluxCD)
IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation)
CI/CD patterns: multi-stage pipelines, artifact versioning
Secrets management (Vault/SSM/KMS/KeyVault)
Container security (Trivy, Twistlock, OPA)
Be ready to explain:
Deployment strategy you introduced
How you reduced release time
How you implemented automated rollbacks
1.5 Incident Response & Postmortems
JD mentions:
Developed and executed incident response plans.
Prepare:
Incident lifecycle (Detection → Triage → Mitigation → Postmortem)
On-call rotations
War room communication
Blameless postmortems
Root cause analysis examples
Tools: PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki
Chaos engineering
Prepare 2 major incidents you handled:
What broke
How you resolved it
What changed after that
1.6 Performance Optimization
JD mentions:
Optimizing system performance.
Prepare:
Profiling (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network latency)
Scaling reads vs scaling writes
Caching layers (Redis/Memcached)
DB performance tuning
JVM/Node/Python performance
Message queues and backpressure
Prepare 1–2 real examples:
Reduced latency from X → Y
Improved RPS or throughput
1.7 Hybrid Infrastructure
JD mentions maintaining hybrid infra:
VMs + Kubernetes
On-prem + cloud
Zero-trust networking
Service discovery
VPN/Transit Gateway/direct connect
Backup + DR strategies
Configuration management (Ansible)
✅ 2. Leadership & Behavioral Preparation
This role expects a Lead SRE.
Prepare stories around:
1. Leading incident response
2. Mentoring junior SREs
3. Stakeholder communication
4. Prioritizing reliability vs feature pressure
5. Scaling an SRE team and culture
6. Driving automation adoption
7. Handling conflict with developers or product teams
Use STAR format for every story.
✅ 3. Architecture Diagrams to Practice
You should be ready to draw (on whiteboard):
Highly available multi-AZ architecture
Multi-region active-active
SaaS architecture with microservices
Disaster recovery topology (RTO/RPO)
PCI/FedRAMP-compliant network segmentation
CI/CD pipeline diagram
Kubernetes cluster internals
✅ 4. Practical Hands-On Check
Make sure you know:
How to optimize Prometheus queries
How to debug CPU throttling in Kubernetes
How to perform DB failover
How to write a Helm chart
How to tune autoscaling
How to setup 3-node etcd cluster securely
How to patch vulnerabilities at scale
✅ 5. Mock Interview Questions (Highly Likely)
SRE & Architecture
How do you design for 99.99% availability?
What’s your approach for capacity planning?
Explain a real incident you handled end-to-end.
How do you reduce MTTR in large systems?
Explain error budgets and how you enforce them.
Compliance
What FedRAMP controls were hardest to implement?
How did you ensure PCI-DSS logging & audit trails?
How do you manage privileged access securely?
Microservices
How do you migrate a monolith database without downtime?
Explain service discovery in microservices.
How do you implement distributed tracing?
Kubernetes
How do you secure a K8s cluster to FedRAMP standards?
How do you debug a memory-leak pod?
Explain sidecar and operator patterns.
Leadership
Tell me about a time you led an incident.
How do you handle disagreements with engineering?
How do you motivate your team during outages?
✅ 7-Day Preparation Plan (Super Focused)
Day 1 – SRE Essentials
SLO, SLI, Error budgets
Incident response stories
HA architecture diagrams
Day 2 – Kubernetes & Microservices
Service mesh
Ingress, autoscaling
Migration strategies
Day 3 – DevOps & CI/CD
GitOps
Terraform
Secrets/security
Day 4 – Compliance (FedRAMP + PCI)
Controls
Documentation
Logging, SIEM, audit
Day 5 – Cloud Architecture Deep Dive
Multi-region
DR
Queues/Event buses
Caching
Day 6 – Leadership & Behavioral
STAR stories
Incident stories
Conflict resolution
Day 7 – Mock Interview
Practice 20 technical questions
Practice 10 leadership questions
Draw 3 architecture diagrams
📌 Want a custom study plan based on YOUR experience?
If you send me:
Your resume
Your experience in SRE/DevOps
Your strong and weak areas
I can generate a personal role-play interview script and mock answers tailored exactly for this job.
Automation
Deployment automation - Jenkins and GitHub actions
AWS automation - Python boto3
others API automate - Python request module (Loki, ClickHouse, Okta)
Ansible for user onboarding and offboarding
bash scripting for Linux-like backup and push to S3 / user creation
PowerShell - for Windows automation
Terraform for VPC , EKS
common
user onboarding, installing software, backup
Monitoring
prometheus, grafana, loki
system metrics - node expo
logs - loki
traces - Python library
blackbox for SSL, healthcheck, and other metrics
SLA Dashboard
Understand the ELK Stack flow and system
Data
SQL - Postgresql
data warehouse - clickhouse
data analytics - Apache Superset
data pipeline - airbyte
REAL TIME TASKS
job failed - create ticket
automated sop
ai bot - run scripts and try to fix issue - if fixed no fixed assign ticket to sre will analyse, rca, debugg and fix issue
monitoring alert - alertmanager (ssl, health check) job failure alert (semaphoreui - teams and outlook and ticket) build failure alert (cicd - ticket)
issues/incident disk full memory high usage ssl expiry domain down server down pipeline failed job execution failed new intern onboarding jobs - install software, create user, grant access newapi/web app deployment migration exploring new tools improving system performance developer issues - access denied, cors error requesst blocked - check waf events setup waf rules db backups db connection issue - pooltimeout supp=iscious activity like rate limit or block bot setting new environment for client log rotate rotate secret - vault docker image building
learningnew systems like kubernetes SRE Pricinples
focusing on how to make system betetr like leveraging kubernetes concepts like for latency leverage pod affinity - to put db and api pod closer
monitoring systems - metrics, traces, logs, events, auditing
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