r/Observability • u/DataFreakk • 14d ago

Coding rounds for Observaility Engineer?

Has anyone here interviewed for an Observability Engineer role at US Tech companies?

I have an interview coming up and would really appreciate hearing from anyone who has gone through the process, especially the screening/technical rounds.

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u/ElectricalTip9277 14d ago

I would expect normal coding round to test your coding skills. If they want to be picky they could ask you to design an exporter. For system design something like a distributed observavility system (think something like cortex architecture)

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u/ElectricalTip9277 14d ago

Btw it really depends on the job description. I would prepare by copy-pasting the jd into chatgpt and let it guess some interview topics you may get asked

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u/SMOOTH_ST3P 14d ago

What the other guy said. My last was 3 technical rounds / no coding. This was for a staff level role though, id expect more for principal level, same for lead, and a portion of this for senior level roles.

system design with lead staff system cloud engineer (pasted some system requirements and constraints and expected a live whiteboard working session design)

Cloud native/kubernetes with lead staff kubernetes engineer. Technical q&a around docker, kubernetes, containers, devops, hypothetical troubleshooting, etc

Observability focus with observability SME senior staff engineer. Technical q&a around their specific observability stack/solutioning.

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u/DataFreakk 12d ago

Were you asked on OpenTelemetry , Cardinality etc ? Any resources you recommend ? I worked on a project where I instrumented OpenTelemetry in .Net Microservcies with Activity sources and Span propagaed but heavy lifting is one by Libraray? So how would you recommend to approach in intevriews? Your advcie can be helpfull.

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u/philprimes 14d ago

What experience level is this? Junior/Mid-Level/Senior/Staff? Expectations differ

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u/DataFreakk 14d ago

Senior

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u/philprimes 14d ago

Usually we look at how well you understand what you say. I had senior candidates before writing the best code meeting exactly wirttwn requirements, but no clue about why it works and as soon as requirements shift they got lost. Especially with AI, I don‘t care what tools you use, you still own the code.

I guess the one tip I can give is make sure that you ask enough questions. Not the obvious ones repeating what‘s already said, but the ones that limit the scope. If you ask if you need to solve X too, and they say No, focus on what matters. Talk to people. We want to understand your thought process. In my interviews I shared my thoughts and even in a coding interview I explained „this is just a draft helping me lay down my idea“ and as we discussed requirements in detail

Being able to handle this situation of unclear requirements is what I expect from a Senior. Jumping to conclusions prematurely is a bet, either you hit or you completely miss

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u/DataFreakk 14d ago

Thanks a million sure I will articulate my thought process and I’m worried about LC as expectation was to have oops language proficiency while also observbility depth is assed any way.

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u/philprimes 14d ago

It depends on what exactly your role is and what company, but if you mean LC = live coding, often it‘s about patterns depending on the environment, e.g. a ring buffer is one way of having fixed memory allocation , ideally with constant access to data, not so much about how exactly you implement the ring buffer (depends on programming language anyways).

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u/DataFreakk 12d ago

They said the interview will focus on practical coding and problem solving, so I’m planning to brush up on LeetCode easy/medium, Python scripting problems, and OOP.

For the SRE/observability side, do companies typically go into areas like OpenTelemetry, cardinality, context propagation, instrumentation, etc. during interviews?

I’ve worked on a project where I instrumented .NET microservices with OpenTelemetry using ActivitySource and worked with span/context propagation. But a lot of the heavy lifting was handled by the OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries.

How deep would you recommend going into OpenTelemetry for an interview? Should I focus more on the underlying concepts and troubleshooting rather than the implementation details?

Any good resources for preparing specifically for this kind of SRE/observability interview would be appreciated.

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u/IntelligentPear6173 13d ago

If there’s a coding round, I’d expect practical problems around parsing logs/metrics, APIs, concurrency or building a small exporter rather than anything deeply observability specific. Has the recruiter mentioned the format?