I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Semrush
Interview
I had an interview for an SRE position. It quickly became clear that the company and I were not a good fit, as they were looking for someone to focus exclusively on monitoring. In reality, the role was more of an Observability Engineer than an SRE. Not many companies differentiate between these roles, so it's not a major issue.
The interview itself went fine, but the feedback I received afterward was truly surprising. It stated that I lacked sufficient knowledge in development and in maintaining high-load systems. What struck me as odd was that during the interview, we didn’t discuss these topics at all, nor was I asked a single question related to them. Either the company uses a generic feedback template, or the interviewer provided feedback based on their own assumptions about my experience.
Either way, it’s not a great look for the company to give such feedback without any basis.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How can you create a highly available Alertmanager cluster?
What is the default retention period in Prometheus?
What is the structure of TSDB?
Dear Sender,
Thanks so much for your feedback and for pointing out the issue. You’re absolutely right—generic feedback isn’t up to our standards. We’ll take a closer look at the process for this role and work on improving it.
Yours, the Semrush Team
I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Semrush in Nov 2023
Interview
After I applied online, they contacted me to select a date to interview the HR. The HR interview took 30 minutes.
They ask you a lot of questions about your
past experience, and typical HR interview questions. But mostly it was like a small tech interview. Although HR doesn't have any tech experience, they asked some technical questions and wrote my answers for the Hiring Team. IMHO, believe this is not helpful at this stage. Because you are talking about some technical details with no tech-person.
Overall, the process was smooth, fast, and transparent.