How to Hire a SRE in 5 minutes

A fast-paced overview of the hiring process for our SRE team, covering the role and goals of SRE, necessary skill sets, the interview process, and how our team works day-to-day. If you are looking to start a SRE team, or want to compare your existing process with other companies, watch this talk.

Transcript

1. How to hire a SRE in 5 minutes MAX TIMCHENKO SRE II TLV
 2017
2. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 “SRE”? 2 “We enable service owners to focus on rapid delivery of value to PagerDuty customers by providing common infrastructure, self-service tooling, best practices, and subject matter expertise.”
3. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Not “SRE” (at PagerDuty) 3 • Operating all the things • Being a language/framework expert • Gate-keeping access to production • Forcing specific processes on teams
4. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 HumanOps 4 “Words are important and very hard.” @arupchak Infrastructure Director, PagerDuty
5. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 HumanOps Skills 5 • Not an ***hole • Can listen • Can mentor and explain • Writes good documentation • Gets stuff done • Understands on-call • Eats food
6. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Technical Skills 6 • Networking (the computer kind) • Release engineering, CI/CD • Software engineering • Application stacks, platforms • Configuration management • Monitoring, observability, alerting • Linux operations and performance • Security
7. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Application Stacks / Platforms 7 • Load balancing • Service discovery • Distributed systems • High availability • Secret management • Cluster managers • Platform-as-a-service
8. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Evolution of Tech Skills and Scale 8
9. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Team Composition 9 Product Owner Manager 1x SRE III 3x SRE II 2x SRE I Scrum Master
10. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Rank Missing Skills 10 Need Borrow? Skill ⭐⭐⭐ No Continuous Deployment ⭐⭐ Yes Managing Complexity ⭐⭐ Yes Software Engineering ⭐ No Config Management “Borrow”: can we borrow this skill 
 from elsewhere in the company?
11. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Job Description 11
12. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 “It is so difficult to hire” 12 • Do you need “10 years of AWS Lambda experience”? • Similar skills, not exact match • Embrace non-traditional backgrounds • Offer remote and flex time
13. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 SRE Backgrounds 13 © Disney/Pixar; https://herure.deviantart.com/art/Monsters-Inc-autographs-151458694
14. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Interview Process 14 • Phone screen, with coding question • On site interview, up to a full day • Up to 6-8 different interview slots • Technical, project, and people skills
15. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Interview Slot Examples 15 • System design • Frontend frameworks • Business acumen • Everyday coding
16. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Discussion Questions 16 “What would you do if you suspect replicants gained access to your production infrastructure?”
17. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Hands-On Questions 17 © 1999 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
18. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Disposable Interview Environments 18
19. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 Evaluation and Scoring 19 םחנמה ינוי :צ''חי םוליצ םיבכוכ םע םידקור לש הנושארה הנועב יול
20. @maxvt DevOps Days TLV 2017 20 Would You Like To Know More? Jason Grimes, “Archetype of a SRE Superhero”, DoD PDX ‘17
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPmr7F5dXWc Camille Fournier, “Building & Motivating Eng Teams”, OSS Leadership Summit ’17
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R-Y2DwWOr0 @maxvt https://www.pagerduty.com/careers Hearing about our SRE team makes you want to be a part of it?