Just finished a 5-week process for a Senior SRE role. Sharing notes because I couldn't find anything recent when I was prepping.
Round structure: Recruiter screen (30 min, mostly timeline + comp calibration) Hiring manager call (45 min, behavioral + org context) Technical panel: two 60-min sessions back to back on the same day Cross-functional panel: one eng, one PM, one from the team you'd actually work with Final hiring manager debrief call
What they actually tested: System design focused on distributed observability. Not a whiteboard puzzle, more 'walk me through how you'd build alerting for a multi-tenant SaaS at 50k customers.' I got follow-up questions on tradeoffs for every choice I made. Behavioral questions were really specific. Not 'tell me about a conflict' but 'tell me about a time you caught a production issue before the customer did, and what changed after.' They want the 'and what changed after' part. One interviewer asked me to walk through an actual incident I'd been on call for. Like, step by step. The technical accuracy mattered but honestly I think the 'how you communicated under pressure' part mattered more.
Timeline from application to offer: 32 days. The recruiter was responsive and the process felt organized. No surprise last-minute rounds.
One thing I didn't expect: they asked about my career trajectory in terms of 'where do you want to be in 4 years.' That was early in the process, not just a closing question. I think they actually weight retention in the hiring decision.