Expensify.com Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So I had this interview for a Site Reliability Engineer role. They started with a take-home technical where I had to set up five VMs for webservers, load balancers, and a nagios server. The catch is, they judge you on metrics they don't even share, and they really don't care about IaC, so don't go overboard. Then there was a cultural interview, which was bizarrely just one question: 'What else are you doing outside your life that Expensify supports?' After that, a timed Python interview involved parsing a CSV and writing it to a SQL database. The on-site was basically a repeat of the Python interview, but with a few extras, plus a timed sysadmin technical and a whiteboard session. It was really frustrating because they didn't even share my take-home results with the on-site interviewers. They apologized for how long the process was, saying they needed to find the right person, but then they don't even pass information between interviewers. In one 30-minute technical challenge, I was expected to learn new libraries and code a solution, and one piece of feedback was that I 'didn't spend enough time thinking about the solution.' It felt like a test of coding under pressure, but that feedback missed the point. Ultimately, I was ruled out for not thinking enough about the best way to solve it, not asking the audience for input during the presentation (which is wild), and the solution not being elegant or efficient enough, despite me pointing out it was done in 30 minutes. I didn't even get to finish the rest of the day.

The interview process was incredibly fun. I started with a laid-back recruiter call. The technical assessment was a blast, letting me experiment freely. Unfortunately, I was rejected after the first official interview. In the past, interviews focused on the assessment with preparation materials for the next stage. This time, it was a rapid-fire technical jargon interview. Only one part was truly SRE-focused, another was SWE-centric, and the rest covered other topics I wasn't fully prepared for. I recommend studying beforehand. Even when I knew some answers, communication was difficult, which I recognize as a personal failing. I should improve my ability to articulate my knowledge. Despite this, the experience boosted my confidence in my building capabilities. Good luck, study up, and have fun!

I saw an ad on LinkedIn for an SRE role at Expensify and instead of a resume, they wanted me to answer some questions, which I did. After that, I was asked to schedule an initial HR screening call. That call went fine, covering my experience and aspirations, even personal ones. The next step was a take-home SRE project that involved setting up a few servers and writing a report about it, which took a few days. After that, I had an interview with a senior SRE where we chatted about the project, my choices, and my work history. I really liked that part. The final stage was a whole day (around 7 hours) of different interviews with other SREs. It started with a sys admin challenge where I had an hour to figure out what was wrong with a server and write an incident report. I enjoyed that challenge, but then I asked who the report was for and they couldn't answer, saying maybe 'upper management?', which was weird since that affects the report's content. After the challenge, I got to ask questions to the SREs about how I handled it and wrote the report. They then decided if I moved on. My interview ended here. They said I didn't look into a moved file, they didn't like my report (which felt unfair since they couldn't tell me the audience), and that I blindly copy-pasted commands (which wasn't true and they never brought it up during the interview). I think their process is misleading because you can't address concerns or get basic questions answered. I told HR but heard nothing back. They should watch that LinkedIn SRE hiring video.