Was contacted on InMail by a recruiter. He was very interested in my skills and we setup a phone interview on the same day. I moved on to the first of two phone screen interviews, the first being a very easy programming challenge, and the second looking at knowledge in many subjects. I passed both of these easily and was brought on site. The hotel I was put up in was very run down, and cheap. Not a deal breaker; but part of why I'm very dissatisfied with this process. The on site consisted of about 6 different interviews / challenges. The first challenge was a live debugging challenge. They give you a RHEL VM and give you several prompts that involve fixing the webserver. These were ridiculous. One of the issues was in a compiled binary that apache includes, and I needed to hunt down what line in the binary this was happening. I was told (after failing this part), that I was supposed to hot fix it in assembly. I told my interview; if I encountered this in prod, I would likely update the package and move on. The second challenge was a whiteboard system architecture challenge. They tell you to draw and explain a system architecture starting out from a single server to several data centers. This was pretty easy. There was then lunch with one of the managers and immediately after that; I had a behavioral interview with a different manager. There was then a "grill you on everything" interview. It was absurd how detailed they asked me to be. One of the questions was, write pseudo-code you would use to re-create the "ls" command, almost certainly not something I would do as an SRE. The last challenge was also a "grill you on everything" interview. He gave me a table of Nagios alerts and 60 seconds to prioritize which alerts I'd respond to first. I failed this hard because I spent the first 20 seconds reading the prompt, and I was expected to be able to decipher their cryptic hostnames. The interviewer was very condescending and asked me point blank if I've ever even used Linux before. I was then given a scenario where there was some database issue and I was responding to, and how would I go about communicating this to my superiors. At the end of the last challenge, I had to get on a flight immediately. I had no time to ask questions or talk to anyone else. My overall impression of this interview was that they were looking for an operations person who was a competent programmer, with 5 years experience but would accept a entry-level salary. They said repeatedly that they weren't looking for operations people; but someone in the middle of developer and ops; after the interview, I find that hard to believe. Several of my interviewers were rude and condescending, especially considering I was still a senior in college and only had a total of 9 months of hands on job experience. I got a call a few weeks later informing me that I was "too junior" for a position such as this. I think what they're looking for is extremely hard to find, and they did a poor job of communicating their expectations for the role.

I was first contacted by recruiter by linkedin message. I applied online, then he wanted to talk to me on the phone (he said he wanted to talk about role and my background). On the phone, he asked about those, then suddenly he gave me a short test, networking and linux command, I wasn't ready for it, thus I couldn't answer most of them. After a day, he informed me that they decided not to proceed.