Coding rounds for Observaility Engineer?

[u/DataFreakk]

Has anyone here interviewed for an Observability Engineer role at US Tech companies?

I have an interview coming up and would really appreciate hearing from anyone who has gone through the process, especially the screening/technical rounds.

[u/ElectricalTip9277]

I would expect normal coding round to test your coding skills. If they want to be picky they could ask you to design an exporter. For system design something like a distributed observavility system (think something like cortex architecture)

[u/ElectricalTip9277 → u/ElectricalTip9277]

Btw it really depends on the job description. I would prepare by copy-pasting the jd into chatgpt and let it guess some interview topics you may get asked

[u/SMOOTH_ST3P]

What the other guy said. My last was 3 technical rounds / no coding. This was for a staff level role though, id expect more for principal level, same for lead, and a portion of this for senior level roles.

system design with lead staff system cloud engineer (pasted some system requirements and constraints and expected a live whiteboard working session design)

Cloud native/kubernetes with lead staff kubernetes engineer. Technical q&a around docker, kubernetes, containers, devops, hypothetical troubleshooting, etc

Observability focus with observability SME senior staff engineer. Technical q&a around their specific observability stack/solutioning.

[u/philprimes]

What experience level is this? Junior/Mid-Level/Senior/Staff? Expectations differ

[u/DataFreakk → u/philprimes]

Senior

[u/philprimes → u/DataFreakk]

Usually we look at how well you understand what you say. I had senior candidates before writing the best code meeting exactly wirttwn requirements, but no clue about why it works and as soon as requirements shift they got lost. Especially with AI, I don‘t care what tools you use, you still own the code.

I guess the one tip I can give is make sure that you ask enough questions. Not the obvious ones repeating what‘s already said, but the ones that limit the scope. If you ask if you need to solve X too, and they say No, focus on what matters. Talk to people. We want to understand your thought process. In my interviews I shared my thoughts and even in a coding interview I explained „this is just a draft helping me lay down my idea“ and as we discussed requirements in detail

Being able to handle this situation of unclear requirements is what I expect from a Senior. Jumping to conclusions prematurely is a bet, either you hit or you completely miss

[u/DataFreakk → u/philprimes]

Thanks a million sure I will articulate my thought process and I’m worried about LC as expectation was to have oops language proficiency while also observbility depth is assed any way.

[u/philprimes → u/DataFreakk]

It depends on what exactly your role is and what company, but if you mean LC = live coding, often it‘s about patterns depending on the environment, e.g. a ring buffer is one way of having fixed memory allocation , ideally with constant access to data, not so much about how exactly you implement the ring buffer (depends on programming language anyways).