Hi everyone! I have an upcoming interview for a Site Reliability Engineer position at Airtable, and I’m trying to prepare as thoroughly as I can. I’m curious if anyone here has insights into their interview process or what kind of technical questions are typically asked.
I’m eager to know what topics are emphasized during the technical interviews. Should I expect more questions related to system design, monitoring and alerting, incident response, or coding challenges? Any information about the level of difficulty would be greatly appreciated as well.
If you have recently been through the SRE interview process at Airtable or know someone who has, any tips or example questions you could provide would be incredibly helpful. Thank you in advance for your support!
From my network, Airtable really focuses on distributed systems fundamentals in SRE interviews. They’ll drill you on CAP theorem and how you’d tackle eventual consistency problems in their architecture. What caught my colleague off guard was how much they care about cost optimization - not just reliability. Expect detailed questions about right-sizing infrastructure and making data-driven scaling decisions. The technical portion usually involves debugging a fake performance issue in their stack. You’ll walk through your process from finding bottlenecks to implementing fixes. They also want to hear about chaos engineering experience, even if you haven’t used Chaos Monkey directly. Be ready to explain how you’ve tested system resilience at previous jobs. Culture-wise, they value learning over being right, which matches their engineering philosophy.
Went through Airtable’s SRE process eight months ago - here’s what I experienced. Technical rounds focused more on system design and operational scenarios than coding. They really cared about how you think through reliability trade-offs and your incident management experience. Big emphasis on observability practices and debugging production issues. Expect questions about specific monitoring tools you’ve used and your SLO philosophy. Their system design questions weren’t abstract - they used realistic scenarios you’d actually face supporting their platform. Brush up on database reliability since they’re data-heavy, and be ready to talk capacity planning from your past roles. Interviewers knew their stuff and genuinely wanted to understand how you solve problems, not test memorized answers. Way more practical than theoretical compared to other SRE interviews I’ve done.
I helped a friend prep for this exact role last year. What caught him off guard was their heavy focus on automation and toil reduction.
They made him walk through automating a manual runbook process step by step. Plus questions about measuring and cutting operational overhead from his past jobs.
The coding wasn’t leetcode at all. More like “write a script to parse these logs and alert on anomalies” or “build a health check endpoint.” Real stuff you’d actually write as an SRE.
They spent serious time on post-mortem culture. Be ready to discuss running blameless post-mortems and what makes them work. They care way more about learning from incidents than just fixing them.
Brush up on load balancing strategies and database connection pooling. My friend said they went deep on handling traffic spikes without over-provisioning resources.
The whole process felt practical. They want to see you can actually do the job, not just talk about it.
Had my Airtable SRE interview six months ago - they’re big on cross-team collaboration. Got grilled on working with engineering teams during architecture reviews and influencing reliability practices when you don’t manage the devs directly. They’ll throw realistic scenarios at you where product teams want to ship fast but you need to keep things stable. The on-call part was intense. They wanted specifics on escalation procedures, how I’ve set up on-call rotations, and my approach to cutting down alert fatigue. Also got hit with questions about gradual rollouts and feature flags as reliability tools. Everything was scenario-based, not theoretical BS. Come prepared with examples of how you’ve improved MTTR and be ready to defend your architectural decisions.
just wrapped up my airtable sre onsite! the behavioral round was tougher than i thought - they really drill down on how u handle pressure and communicate during outages. got asked about a time i had to choose between availability vs consistency. they also grilled me hard on terraform and kubernetes troubleshooting, which i wasn’t expecting. good luck!