Hey everyone! I recently had a technical interview for an SRE role that mainly focused on networking, and I've just been invited to a 30-minute virtual interview with the Director of SRE. The email didn't provide much detail about what we'll be discussing. I'm curious about what I might encounter in a director-level interview. Will it be more behavioral, system design, culture fit, or high-level technical discussion? I'd really appreciate any insights or tips on how to prepare for this!
5 Answers
Expect questions on how you handle incidents under pressure and balance reliability with feature velocity. They’ll want to know about trade-offs you've made between competing priorities and how you'd design monitoring strategies or manage stakeholders during outages. Culture fit will be key too; they might ask about mentoring juniors or collaborating across teams. Since you nailed the technical part, they’re likely looking for strategic thinking and how well you'll mesh with their team culture. I’m part of a team that created this interview assistant tool to help tackle these tough behavioral questions for situations just like this!
What kind of networking questions did they hit you with in the last round?
Which company are you interviewing with?
It’s a startup!
It really varies by company and interviewer. My director-level interviews covered a bit of everything—be prepared to showcase your knowledge about the company and just be confident in what you bring.
Wow, so all of that in just 30 minutes?! Seems pretty packed!
Make sure you also understand the business impact of your technical decisions. Directors are interested in how you think at scale.
They asked me to write a piece of code to fetch the MAC address and rotate a list.