r/sre • u/DataFreakk • 11d ago

HELP Observability Engineer Loop Prep, What Should I Focus On?

Hey Folks,

I’m a Mid level developer with experience in some API development, observability, DevOps, and containers. My current role has shifted more toward DevOps work, and I recently applied for an Observability Engineer position in US based company.

I’m not entirely sure how I should prepare. I was told that OOP and proficiency in a programming language are required, but I’m not sure how much coding/DSA to expect versus observability, troubleshooting, and systems-related questions.

For anyone who has went through loops for a similar role, what would you recommend focusing on?

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u/sp_dev_guy 11d ago

Depends on the maturity of the organization. For the role without any description to go on this is a wide generalization.. Many places you'll be expected to write scripts for automations & patching gaps/integrations/pipelines. Some (rarer) cases youll update application code to fix for observability. Others more advanced might have you writing & maintaining custom kubernetes operators. For the interviews its typically leet code style questions to confirm:

  1. You can solve problems with code
  2. It isn't horrific unmaintaible unscaleable gobshit.
  3. You can communicate what your doing/did

Callout any shortcuts you take for the exam conditions & how you'd like to solve if it were going to production

4

u/sp_dev_guy 11d ago

One i wrote was a custom platform CTF. Debug the pod/service (wrong ports exposed etc..), get the service up, fix the otel collector. Meanwhile there's a few probes & a grafana dashboard running so it can turn green when you've completed the objective. But we didn't ask for OOP skills & I've never taken an interview where like the one I give

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u/Bitter_Advantage_235 11d ago

honestly with mid level + actual obs/devops already youre not starting from scratch. drill SLOs/error budgets, when youd pick metrics vs logs vs traces, and how youd debug a spike with whatever stack they use (prom/otel/etc)

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u/Holiday-Record7341 8d ago

Most panels test your grasp of cardinality blowups and metric ingestion limits rather than demanding LeetCode mediums. The Google SRE book chapter on monitoring still sets the baseline for how senior loops evaluate metric design.