Microsoft Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions

I would describe the incident, the user impact, and the first signal that alerted the team. Then I would walk through how I investigated, what mitigation I chose, and how I kept communication clear while the issue was unfolding. The reason I choose this structure is that Microsoft SRE interviews care a lot about decisions under uncertainty. I would also mention the postmortem actions and what changed afterward to reduce the chance of recurrence. If the interviewer wants more detail, I would explain what I would do differently next time.

I would define the SLO in terms of the user experience that matters most, such as availability or successful request completion within an acceptable latency. Then I would justify the target using customer expectations, business risk, and what level of reliability is realistic for the system. The reason I choose this approach is that an SLO should reflect user impact, not just an arbitrary number. I would also think about the error budget and how it would influence release decisions. If the interviewer wants more detail, I would explain how I would measure the SLI and validate the target over time.

I would base alerts on symptoms that users actually feel, not just internal component metrics. Then I would use thresholds, burn-rate alerts, and deduplication so the team gets pages only when the service is truly at risk. The reason I choose this design is that noisy alerts make on-call less effective and reduce trust in the system. I would also think about severity levels, suppression during incidents, and periodic review of alerts that never lead to action. If the interviewer wants more detail, I would discuss how I would test alerts against past outages.

I would open saturation, error rate, and deploy-change dashboards first. That gives me a quick view of whether the issue is capacity-related, failure-related, or tied to a recent release. The reason I choose these three is that they usually point to the most likely class of problem quickly. I would also think about segmenting by region, endpoint, or request type if the spike is isolated. If the interviewer wants more detail, I would explain how I would use those dashboards to decide the next debugging step.

I would compare the affected region against healthy regions and look at logs, traces, saturation, and recent infrastructure changes. Then I would check whether the problem is tied to a specific dependency, deployment, or network path. The reason I choose this approach is that intermittent regional failures often come from a narrow cause rather than a global one. I would also think about whether the issue is visible in customer reports before the infra metrics move. If the interviewer wants more detail, I would describe how I would isolate the fault domain.