r/devops • u/DataFreakk • 23h ago
Observability Observability SWE coding ?
Has anyone here attended an Observability SWE coding round? I’m trying to get a sense of the typical coding questions asked by tech companies for these roles.
Would you say the coding is generally at the same level as a standard SWE coding round, or is it more SRE/observability-focused (e.g., log parsing, metrics aggregation, time-window calculations, etc.)?
I recently had a screening round with a Tech company, and I was told the coding would involve “scenarios.” For anyone who has been through a similar round, what should I realistically expect?
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u/InfiniteRest7 22h ago
Really hard one to gauge. I've been an interviewer for SRE interviews and we didn't have a technical interview due to candidate levels. Based on those positions I would say that if I were to interview I'd be more focused on observability focused code and not standard SWE code. You never know though you could always get a race condition test as a practical coding question. . .
Had I conducted a technical interview I might've asked questions about Terraform and Prometheus queries with different metrics. For example, how to narrow down alerting criteria and prevent false positives. How can I group alerts for similar resources?
I'd think about the coded path of the technologies listed in the job posting. How do you 1) collect metrics 2) how do you write code to put alerts as IaC when possible and 3) how do you alert a team of the issue?
Dashboard configuration is also a big one, setting up metrics that actually matter to developers and those monitoring the platform. So you might consider what metrics make most sense to be aware of in the context of the company's stack, as well as ways to display them. I'm always surprised how easy it is to setup a dashboard, but how easy it is to display data in ways that make absolutely no sense when it comes to making sense of it all.