Google Interview Prep Guide

Site Reliability Engineering

What’s a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)?

Everyday, Site Reliability Engineers ​tackle some of the most complex software and systems
issues on the planet. As a SRE, you'll be working with Google code that runs in infrastructure,
frontend and backend technology. You’ll be responsible for the design, build and development
of massively distributed, fault-tolerant software systems and infrastructure, encompassing all
of our products and services. This can range from distributed change propagation on live
serving systems, to designing distributed hash tables and implementing automation and
monitoring solutions for the largest user-facing service in the world. Check out our ​website
and ​book to learn more about our team and the work that we do. ​You can also listen to a
podcast​ that one of our SRE directors did with Software Engineering Daily.

Google’s engineering organization carries a flat structure in which Managers and Individual
Contributors are weighted equally within Google. You can grow your entire career here as an
individual contributor or if you have a passion for staying technical, while wanting to grow
your people management skills, Google affords this opportunity. The general SRE
organizational structure consists of a Site Director, managing varying levels of Site Reliability
Managers, who lead teams of 6-10 (a mix of Software and Systems Engineers). SRE team
focuses typically fall into two technical areas: Application SRE’s (Gmail, Maps, Search,
Youtube, Chrome, etc.) and Infrastructure SRE’s (Spanner, Bigtable, Dremel, Ganeti, Borg).

Why Google? Impact.

Google is and always will be an engineering company. We hire people with a broad set of
technical skills who are ready to tackle some of technology's greatest challenges and make an
impact on millions, if not billions, of users. At Google, engineers not only revolutionize search,
they routinely work on massive scalability and storage solutions, large-scale applications and
develop entirely new platforms around the world. From AdWords to Chrome, Android to
YouTube, Cloud to Maps, Google engineers are changing the world one technological
achievement after another.

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The SRE Interview Tracks

General Interview Tips

Explain - We want to understand how you think, so explain your thought process and decision
making throughout the interview. Remember we’re not only evaluating your technical ability,
but also how you solve problems. Explicitly state and check assumptions with your interviewer
to ensure they are reasonable.
​Clarify - Many questions will be deliberately open-ended to provide insight into what
categories and information you value within the technological puzzle. We’re looking to see
how you engage with the problem and your primary method for solving it. Be sure to talk
through your thought process and feel free to ask specific questions if you need clarification.
Improve - ​Think about ways to improve the solution you present. It’s worthwhile to think out
loud about your initial thoughts to a question. In many cases, your first answer may need some
refining and further explanation. If necessary, start with the brute force solution and improve
on it — just let the interviewer know that's what you're doing and why.
Practice - You won’t have access to an IDE or compiler during the interview so practice
writing code on paper or a whiteboard. Be sure to test your code and ensure it’s easily
readable without bugs. Don’t stress about small syntactical errors like which substring to use
for a given method (e.g. start, end or start, length) — just pick one and let your interviewer
know.

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The Technical Phone Interviews
Your phone interview will cover data structures and algorithms. Be prepared to write around
20-30 lines of code in your strongest language. Approach all scripting as a coding exercise —
this should be clean, rich, robust code.

1. You will be asked an open ended question. Ask clarifying questions, devise
requirements.
2. You will be asked to explain it in an algorithm.
3. Convert it to a workable code. (Hint: Don't worry about getting it perfect because time
is limited. Write what comes but then refine it later. Also make sure you consider
corner cases and edge cases, production ready.)
4. Optimize the code, follow it with test cases and find any bugs.

Technical Prep - Software Engineering

Coding - ​You should know at least one programming language really well, preferably C++,
Java, Python, Go or C. You will be expected to know APIs, Object Oriented Design and
Programming, how to test your code, as well as come up with corner cases and edge cases
for code. Note that we focus on conceptual understanding rather than memorization. Have a
look at the G
​ oogle Style Guide​ ​for more info.

Algorithms - ​Approach the problem with both from the bottom-up and the top-down
algorithms. You will be expected to know the complexity of an algorithm and how you can
improve/change it. Algorithms that are used to solve Google problems include: sorting (plus
searching and binary search), divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming/memoization,
greediness, recursion or algorithms linked to a specific data structure. Know Big-O notations
(e.g. run time, space) and be ready to discuss standard, well established algorithms. You may

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wish to discuss or use bullets to outline the algorithm you have in mind before writing code.

Sorting - ​Be familiar with common sorting functions and on what kind of input data they’re
efficient on or not. Think about efficiency means in terms of runtime and space used. For
example, in exceptional cases insertion-sort or radix-sort are much better than the generic
QuickSort/MergeSort/HeapSort answers.

Data structures - ​Study up on as many other structures and algorithms as possible. Read
about the most famous classes of NP-complete problems. You will also need to know about
trees, ​basic tree construction, traversal and manipulation algorithms, ​hash tables, stacks,
arrays, linked lists, priority queues, and when they are appropriate.

Recursion - Many coding problems involve thinking recursively and potentially coding a
recursive solution. Prepare for recursion—which can sometimes be tricky if not approached
properly. Use recursion to find more elegant solutions to problems that can be solved
iteratively.

Mathematics - Some interviewers ask basic discrete math questions. Spend some time
before the interview refreshing your memory on (or teaching yourself) the essentials of
elementary probability theory and combinatorics. You should be familiar with n-choose-k
problems and their ilk.

Technical Prep - Systems Engineering

Practical Coding / Scripting ​- ​Can your code tell a computer what to do? This coding
exercise will assess simple algorithm/data structure implementation. We are looking for a
solution that shows you understand your language usage well with a clean and working
implementation that’s efficient.

Operating Systems ​- Understand processes, threads, concurrency issues, locks, mutexes,

semaphores, monitors and how they work. Understand deadlock, livelock and how to avoid
them. Know what resources a process and a thread needs. Understand how context switching
works, how it's initiated by the operating system and underlying hardware. Know a little about

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scheduling and the fundamentals of "modern" concurrency constructs.

Unix / Linux Systems ​-Know what’s happening under the hood. Understand kernels, libraries,
system calls, memory management, permissions, file systems, client-server protocols and the
shell. Check out the online books ​The Art of Unix Programming ​and ​Advanced Programming in
the Unix Environment​ to review system fundamentals.

Troubleshooting ​- ​I​nterviewers are looking for a logical and structured approach to problem
solving through network or distributed systems scenarios. Some troubleshooting examples
include an ​App Engine outage​ and the​ ​Life in App Engine Production​.

Systems Design ​- ​System design que​stions are used to assess a candidate's ability to
combine knowledge, theory, experience and judgement toward solving a real-world
engineering problem. ​Sample topics include distributed systems, designing a system under
certain constraints, simplicity, limitations, robustness and tradeoffs. Make sure you also have
an understanding of how the internet works and be familiar with the various pieces (routers,
domain name servers, load balancers, firewalls, etc.). For information on system design, check
out our​ research​ on distributed systems and parallel computing.

Mathematics ​- ​Estimating large numbers is extremely beneficial when thinking at Google

scale. Consider brushing up on your powers of 2 and 10. Also commit to memory
“Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculations”​ ​that will help you assess system design trade-offs.

Networking (optional) ​- Show off your depth of knowledge and understanding of network
theory, like different protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, ICMP, etc), MAC addresses, IP packets, DNS, OSI
layers, and load balancing.

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Resources
Books About Google
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Company - Google
Systems The Google story
Betsy Beyer​, ​Chris Jones​, ​Niall Richard Murphy​, ​Jennifer
Petoff Life @ Google

Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Google Developers

Your Next Job Open Source Projects
John Mongan, Eric Giguere, Noah Suojanen, Noah Github: Google Style Guide
Kindler
Programming Pearls
Jon Bentley
Introduction to Algorithms
Thomas Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ronald
Rivest, Clifford Stein
Computer System Engineering
Robert Morris, Samuel Madden
Cracking the Coding Interview
Gayle Laakmann McDowell

Interview Prep Google Publications

How we hire The Google File System
Interviewing @ Google Bigtable
How to: Prepare for a Google Engineering Interview MapReduce
Technical Development Guide Google Spanner
Scalable web architecture & distributed systems Google Chubby
How complex systems fail
Building software systems at Google and lessons learned
Putting Google’s network to work for you
Meet Site Reliability Engineers at Google

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