Interviews/Infrastructure & Reliability/Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Hire SREs
who actually keep the pager quiet

With EasyEnv we build a fit test for the role. Use it to cut the noise at the top of the funnel, or to go deep on the candidates who matter.

You can even evaluate how this person works with AI. So you hire the engineer who can ship, not the one who looks good in a slide.

KubernetesPrometheus · GrafanaOpenTelemetrySLOs · Error budgetsLive or take-home

Request a Demo Create a Free Account

Real Linux VM

Not a sandbox

systemd, kernel, full toolchain

Browser-based

Zero install for candidates

One link and they are in

Auto-graded

Pass / fail checks per challenge

Plus the full session replay

An SRE is judged by what does not happen. The good ones see the latency curve bending before the page fires. EasyEnv puts the candidate in a workspace with a real service, real dashboards and a slow leak that is about to burst the error budget.

Inside a live interview

What you see when they work.

Real cluster, real metrics, every keystroke recorded.

billing-api

AMS

Billing-api

src

billing.py

auth.py

models.py

tests

test_billing.pyM

test_auth.py

pyproject.toml

README.md

Pybilling.py

from decimal import Decimal

def calculate_total(items: list[dict]) -> Decimal:

# Sum line totals using Decimal for currency precision

total = Decimal("0")

for item in items:

total += Decimal(str(item["price"])) * item["qty"]

return total

candidate@sre-workspace:~

alice@dev:~/billing-api$

● mainPython 3.12

Claude · ready

Claude

You

Refactor calculate_total to use Decimal for currency math, and add a test.

Claude

Ask Claude...

Mike

Sam

How it works

Three steps. Zero infra to maintain.

Pick the fit test

Use a ready-made challenge or ask us to build one for your stack. Live, take-home, or both.

Send one link

The candidate clicks. A full Linux workspace boots in their browser. No installs, no VPN, no zoom-share.

Review at 2x

Replay the session, read the auto-graded checks, and decide. Most reviews take under five minutes.

The problem

Why hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is hard.

SRE depth is hard to read from a CV. Everyone has "owned production" somewhere.

Incident judgement only shows up under time pressure. Whiteboards miss it.

Tooling fluency varies. Prometheus, Datadog, Honeycomb, Loki, each has its own muscle memory.

The line between SRE and DevOps is fuzzy. You need signal on the parts that actually matter for your team.

The fit test

What we measure for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

Every area runs inside a real production-like workspace. The candidate works in a browser, the session records itself.

Reading the dashboard

A Grafana board with two metrics moving together. They have to argue which is the cause.

Live incident drill

A real service degrading, with logs, metrics and traces, all live. We watch how they triage.

SLO and error budget

Live conversation around a service SLO, anchored to its actual burn rate over the last week.

Rollout safety

A canary that looked clean but caused a slow leak. They walk back through what they would have caught.

Linux under load

A node with high load average and a misbehaving process. systemd, top and journalctl are real.

AI collaboration

Allow AI in the incident drill and grade whether they verify what it claims about the metrics.

The stack we put in front of them.

Real tools, pre-installed, accessible from the workspace terminal.

KubernetesPrometheusGrafanaLokiTempoOpenTelemetryDatadogPagerDutyArgo RolloutsIstioLinkerdNginxHAProxyPostgreSQLRedissystemdbash

Sample challenges

What a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) interview looks like.

Pick from our library or ask us to build a challenge for your stack. Each one is a real workspace, not a snippet.

Challenge 01

The latency that came back

Scenario

p99 latency on the checkout service tripled an hour ago. Grafana, logs and traces are all open.

What you learn

Whether they correlate across the three layers or jump to the first plausible cause.

In the workspace

$ ls challenges/

workspace, runbook.md, README.md

candidate has:

· a real Linux box in the browser
· kubectl, docker, terraform, jq, yq
· cluster, repo and cloud creds pre-wired
· auto-checks running in the background

interviewer sees:

· every keystroke + every command
· terminal + screen recording
· auto-graded pass/fail per check

AI in the loop

Score the engineer, and how they work with AI.

In an incident, AI is fast but overconfident. It will happily suggest restarting the wrong pod. EasyEnv records every prompt so you see whether the candidate cross-checked the LLM against the metric they actually have on screen.

Allow or block AI per question, not per interview

Full prompt and response history replayed in the review

Score "verifies AI output" as a separate signal

Ready to hire a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who ships?

Set up your first interview in under an hour. We will help you build a fit test for this role on your stack.

Request a Demo Create a Free Account

Role FAQ

Hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), answered.

On enterprise plans we can connect read-only Grafana or Datadog dashboards into the workspace, scoped to a test service.

Yes. Live sessions let an interviewer play the role of an unhappy stakeholder while the candidate triages.

No. The workspace runs in their browser. Terminal, editor, ports and dashboards are all served from the EasyEnv workspace, so candidate setup is zero.

Each challenge has automated checks (did the service come back, did the test pass, did the right log message appear) plus a recording your team can replay. Most reviews take under five minutes.

Yes. AI access is a per-interview setting. Block it for fundamentals, then allow it later in the loop to assess AI collaboration separately.

Interviews/Infrastructure & Reliability/Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Hire SREs
who actually keep the pager quiet

With EasyEnv we build a fit test for the role. Use it to cut the noise at the top of the funnel, or to go deep on the candidates who matter.

You can even evaluate how this person works with AI. So you hire the engineer who can ship, not the one who looks good in a slide.

KubernetesPrometheus · GrafanaOpenTelemetrySLOs · Error budgetsLive or take-home

Request a Demo Create a Free Account

Real Linux VM

Not a sandbox

systemd, kernel, full toolchain

Browser-based

Zero install for candidates

One link and they are in

Auto-graded

Pass / fail checks per challenge

Plus the full session replay

Inside a live interview

What you see when they work.

Real cluster, real metrics, every keystroke recorded.

billing-api

AMS

Billing-api

src

billing.py

auth.py

models.py

tests

test_billing.pyM

test_auth.py

pyproject.toml

README.md

Pybilling.py

from decimal import Decimal

def calculate_total(items: list[dict]) -> Decimal:

# Sum line totals using Decimal for currency precision

total = Decimal("0")

for item in items:

total += Decimal(str(item["price"])) * item["qty"]

return total

candidate@sre-workspace:~

alice@dev:~/billing-api$

● mainPython 3.12

Claude · ready

Claude

You

Refactor calculate_total to use Decimal for currency math, and add a test.

Claude

Ask Claude...

Mike

Sam

How it works

Three steps. Zero infra to maintain.

Pick the fit test

Use a ready-made challenge or ask us to build one for your stack. Live, take-home, or both.

Send one link

The candidate clicks. A full Linux workspace boots in their browser. No installs, no VPN, no zoom-share.

Review at 2x

Replay the session, read the auto-graded checks, and decide. Most reviews take under five minutes.

The problem

Why hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is hard.

SRE depth is hard to read from a CV. Everyone has "owned production" somewhere.

Incident judgement only shows up under time pressure. Whiteboards miss it.

Tooling fluency varies. Prometheus, Datadog, Honeycomb, Loki, each has its own muscle memory.

The line between SRE and DevOps is fuzzy. You need signal on the parts that actually matter for your team.

The fit test

What we measure for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

Every area runs inside a real production-like workspace. The candidate works in a browser, the session records itself.

Reading the dashboard

A Grafana board with two metrics moving together. They have to argue which is the cause.

Live incident drill

A real service degrading, with logs, metrics and traces, all live. We watch how they triage.

SLO and error budget

Live conversation around a service SLO, anchored to its actual burn rate over the last week.

Rollout safety

A canary that looked clean but caused a slow leak. They walk back through what they would have caught.

Linux under load

A node with high load average and a misbehaving process. systemd, top and journalctl are real.

AI collaboration

Allow AI in the incident drill and grade whether they verify what it claims about the metrics.

The stack we put in front of them.

Real tools, pre-installed, accessible from the workspace terminal.

KubernetesPrometheusGrafanaLokiTempoOpenTelemetryDatadogPagerDutyArgo RolloutsIstioLinkerdNginxHAProxyPostgreSQLRedissystemdbash

Sample challenges

What a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) interview looks like.

Pick from our library or ask us to build a challenge for your stack. Each one is a real workspace, not a snippet.

Challenge 01

The latency that came back

Scenario

p99 latency on the checkout service tripled an hour ago. Grafana, logs and traces are all open.

What you learn

Whether they correlate across the three layers or jump to the first plausible cause.

In the workspace

$ ls challenges/

workspace, runbook.md, README.md

candidate has:

· a real Linux box in the browser
· kubectl, docker, terraform, jq, yq
· cluster, repo and cloud creds pre-wired
· auto-checks running in the background

interviewer sees:

· every keystroke + every command
· terminal + screen recording
· auto-graded pass/fail per check

AI in the loop

Score the engineer, and how they work with AI.

Allow or block AI per question, not per interview

Full prompt and response history replayed in the review

Score "verifies AI output" as a separate signal

Ready to hire a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who ships?

Set up your first interview in under an hour. We will help you build a fit test for this role on your stack.

Request a Demo Create a Free Account

Role FAQ

Hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), answered.

On enterprise plans we can connect read-only Grafana or Datadog dashboards into the workspace, scoped to a test service.

Yes. Live sessions let an interviewer play the role of an unhappy stakeholder while the candidate triages.

No. The workspace runs in their browser. Terminal, editor, ports and dashboards are all served from the EasyEnv workspace, so candidate setup is zero.

Each challenge has automated checks (did the service come back, did the test pass, did the right log message appear) plus a recording your team can replay. Most reviews take under five minutes.

Yes. AI access is a per-interview setting. Block it for fundamentals, then allow it later in the loop to assess AI collaboration separately.

How to Hire an SRE | Real Incidents, Real Workspaces | EasyEnv | EasyEnv

Hire SREswho actually keep the pager quiet

What you see when they work.

Three steps. Zero infra to maintain.

Pick the fit test

Send one link

Review at 2x

Why hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is hard.

What we measure for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

Reading the dashboard

Live incident drill

SLO and error budget

Rollout safety

Linux under load

AI collaboration

The stack we put in front of them.

What a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) interview looks like.

The latency that came back

Score the engineer, and how they work with AI.

Ready to hire a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who ships?

Hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), answered.

Hire SREswho actually keep the pager quiet

What you see when they work.

Three steps. Zero infra to maintain.

Pick the fit test

Send one link

Review at 2x

Why hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is hard.

What we measure for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

Reading the dashboard

Live incident drill

SLO and error budget

Rollout safety

Linux under load

AI collaboration

The stack we put in front of them.

What a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) interview looks like.

The latency that came back

Score the engineer, and how they work with AI.

Ready to hire a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who ships?

Hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), answered.

Hire SREs
who actually keep the pager quiet

Hire SREs
who actually keep the pager quiet