Avalara Site Reliability Engineer interviews, decoded.

The whole process took about 1-2 weeks, but in the end, HR just went silent. They were also offering less salary than I'm currently making. Even though the job was remote, they mentioned occasional visits to the Pune office might be needed. It started with a typical psychometric and quantitative test. Then I interviewed with the manager, who gave me a take-home assignment. After that, there were three more interviews: one for system design, one for coding, and a final one for cultural fit.

The interview process was normal but quite long with many rounds. It involved technical discussions about cloud, CI/CD, deployment, and Terraform, as well as a moderately difficult homework assignment for a DevOps task. I interviewed with people of various levels, including a VP, Manager, and Technical experts.

So I went through 7 rounds, which felt like a lot, but they were pretty tough. I passed them all and I think the interviewers were pretty happy with my performance. But then, after they asked about my salary expectations, there was just silence. I had to reach out myself to find out I didn't get the job for reasons they didn't specify. It made me think maybe they had someone in mind already, like an internal hire, and were just going through the motions.