Just wrapped up an Uber SRE interview loop. 5 rounds over two days (virtual). Sharing because I couldn't find recent SRE-specific info anywhere.
Round 1: coding. Not algorithmic in the classic sense. They gave me a rate-limiter problem and asked me to implement it, then extend it for distributed systems. Medium difficulty but the follow-ups got spicy fast. They want to see that you know WHERE the edges are.
Round 2: system design. I got 'design Uber Surge Pricing.' This is a famous Uber question apparently. Have a strong opinion about the tradeoff between consistency and latency in pricing updates. I went with eventual consistency and they pushed back. Have a good reason ready.
Round 3: another coding round. More standard LeetCode-adjacent. Sliding window type stuff. Went fine.
Round 4: ops/on-call. Scenario-based. Given a situation where 3 regions are returning 500s and your dashboards are lagging. Walk them through your incident response, what you escalate, how you communicate. This is where SRE interviews diverge from SWE and you should NOT prep them the same way.
Round 5: behavioral. Two interviewers. They REALLY dig into ownership. They asked me to name a time I fixed something I wasn't responsible for and then pushed three layers deep into 'what would you have done if leadership hadn't supported it.' Concrete examples with real stakes, not vague leadership narratives.
Net: got an offer at L5. The process was well-organized. Interviewers were actually prepared and knew my background.