My interview experience with SolarWinds was extremely disappointing. The JD clearly described a Staff SRE role focused on reliability engineering, observability, automation, SLOs, and system design — but the technical panel had absolutely nothing to do with SRE. The interviewers were purely DevOps-focused and asked only about pipelines, EKS, Ansible, and day-to-day deployment tasks. None of the questions aligned with the SRE principles advertised in the job description.
It was obvious the interviewers came from a traditional DevOps background and were evaluating candidates only based on what they personally work on, not what the company claims the role expects. The mismatch was so wide that it felt like interviewing for a completely different job. The managerial round was solid and actually aligned with SRE, but the technical panel ruined the entire evaluation.
