GitHub Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

My experience applying for this role was frustrating. The recruiter rescheduled our initial call, and the new time conflicted with family plans, but I accepted. When I joined the call, no one showed up. After 30 minutes of waiting and trying different call IDs, I was told the recruiter's computer wouldn't boot, and we had to reschedule again. The next available slot was a month later. I mentioned I was interviewing elsewhere and wanted to expedite things, but they claimed they'd hired someone in two weeks before. They were unsure about the differences between this SRE role and their advertised Platform Reliability Engineer (PRE) and Infrastructure Engineer roles, promising to send more info. The next day, I unexpectedly received a technical test for the PRE role, not the SRE role I applied for. I reiterated my interest in the SRE position, but it took them three weeks to reply, and they hadn't understood my email, as they thought I was waiting on the PRE test and sent it again. We eventually scheduled the SRE technical exercise, which had an 8-hour time limit and was fun but time-consuming, with unclear evaluation criteria. I submitted my work, but felt exhausted and had lost a day with my family. I inquired about feedback and submission receipt. Two weeks later, I was told it was taking longer due to Thanksgiving. Surprisingly, the next day, I was invited to a call with a hiring manager. This call focused on behavioral questions ('tell me a time when,' 'what are your thoughts on') rather than my technical submission. The day after that, I received a generic rejection email stating they were moving forward with other candidates, with no explanation. My request for feedback went unanswered, as expected.

The interview process felt disorganized. It started with an automated system assigning a technical challenge, which involved writing a DNS client using existing libraries. The instructions for this challenge were inconsistent. The first human interaction was with a recruiter who seemed unfamiliar with my application details, including the role, my name, and my time zone. They scheduled a half-hour call to discuss interview tips, only to realize the next interview slots were a month away. Their second attempt at a pre-interview call was condescending and lacked genuine interest. The actual interviews consisted of three 45-minute Zoom sessions back-to-back. The interviewers also didn't know the specific role I applied for but followed a script and were generally polite. Another recruiter interrupted before the third interview to direct us to a different Zoom link. After the final interview, I was told to expect a response within 48 hours. However, due to a hiring freeze, I was ghosted by Github. After a week, my attempt to follow up with a recruiter led to being passed to another unresponsive recruiter. The overall experience was poorly managed and unpleasant, contributing to the negative reviews of the Github interview process.

I applied online because I'd heard about some of the new projects GitHub is working on. A recruiter reached out via email, and we scheduled a video call for later that week. She spent about 30 minutes learning about my background and asking some standard questions. Next, I was given a take-home assignment, which was pretty fun. A few days after I submitted it, I got an email to set up meetings with technical folks and the hiring manager. Everyone I met seemed really capable. The hiring manager was a bit eccentric, but we clicked by the second meeting. About a week later, the recruiter called to say my experience wasn't quite what they were looking for. She mentioned their 'no-feedback' policy, which is pretty standard across tech companies these days.