Prepare for your PagerDuty SRE interview

Incident management and on-call design cases calibrated to PagerDuty’s reliability-first, blameless post-mortem culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What PagerDuty is looking for

Incident Design Interview

Incident Response Architecture

01Escalation Policy Design

02Runbook Coverage & Automation

03MTTR & MTTA Optimization

04On-Call Load & Burnout Prevention

SRE Case Interview

Operational Excellence

01Post-Mortem Design & Action Items

02Toil Identification & Automation

03Change Management Controls

04Service Ownership & Reliability Contracts

Behavioral Interview

01Blameless Incident Culture

02On-Call Ownership & Accountability

03Reliability vs Feature Velocity Trade-offs

04Cross-Team Incident Coordination

Incident response workflow design//MTTR/MTTA optimization cases//Blameless post-mortem culture

Practice Library

PagerDuty exercises

Ready to ace your PagerDuty SRE interview?

Prepare for your PagerDuty SRE interview

Incident management and on-call design cases calibrated to PagerDuty’s reliability-first, blameless post-mortem culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What PagerDuty is looking for

Incident Design Interview

Incident Response Architecture

01Escalation Policy Design

02Runbook Coverage & Automation

03MTTR & MTTA Optimization

04On-Call Load & Burnout Prevention

SRE Case Interview

Operational Excellence

01Post-Mortem Design & Action Items

02Toil Identification & Automation

03Change Management Controls

04Service Ownership & Reliability Contracts

Behavioral Interview

01Blameless Incident Culture

02On-Call Ownership & Accountability

03Reliability vs Feature Velocity Trade-offs

04Cross-Team Incident Coordination

Incident response workflow design//MTTR/MTTA optimization cases//Blameless post-mortem culture

How It Works

Master PagerDuty SRE Interviews

Incident response and on-call design cases scored on PagerDuty’s operational excellence dimensions. · Click to expand

1Your DevOps Goals

Infrastructure Reliability

Practitioner

CI/CD Design

Practitioner

2DevOps Case Prep

MTTA is 4.2 min but MTTR is 47 min - above the 15-min SLA. Incident volume tripled....

CASE INTERVIEWMedium

PagerDuty

3Frameworks

Framework

Are CI/CD pipeline failures driving failures?

Is test coverage insufficient to catch regressions?

Unit test coverage: 48% (target: 80%)

Integration tests added for only 22% of new endpoints

Is environment parity between staging and prod broken?

Config drift detected in 14 of 38 services (37%)

Staging DB uses v14.2, prod uses v14.8 — schema divergence

Are release process failures the root cause?

Are unapproved changes bypassing change management?

55% of post-mortem incidents traced to unapproved hotfixes

Change freeze violations: 8 in last 90 days

Is rollback capability too slow to limit blast radius?

Mean rollback time: 47 min (SLA: 10 min)

6 of 18 services lack automated rollback scripts

Is infrastructure reliability causing deployment failures?

Are stale dependencies creating compatibility failures?

42% of services running EOL dependencies (>18 months old)

3 critical CVEs in prod introduced in last 60 days

Is Terraform configuration drift causing infra failures?

8 IaC drift incidents/month detected via Terraform plan

Manual changes applied directly to 9 prod resources (bypassing IaC)

4Feedback

Infrastructure Reliability

Distinctive

Incident Response Design

Strong

CI/CD Architecture

Meeting Bar

Observability & Diagnostics

Strong

Repeat

Practice Library

PagerDuty exercises

Your SRE team's MTTA is 4.2 minutes but MTTR is 47 minutes — above the 15-minute SLA....

CASE INTERVIEWMedium

DevOps / SRE · Incident Response DesignPagerDuty

Design an escalation policy for a 60-engineer platform team that reduces alert fatigue...

LEARNHard

DevOps / On-Call · Escalation ArchitecturePagerDuty

A major incident post-mortem reveals that 70% of SEV-1s lack runbooks. Design a runbook...

LEARNMedium

DevOps / SRE · Runbook StrategyPagerDuty

Tell me about a time you were on-call for a major incident. Walk me through what...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · Incident OwnershipPagerDuty

Describe how you fostered a blameless post-mortem culture on a team that had...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · Blameless CulturePagerDuty