Interview Experience – Site Reliability Engineer I interviewed for a Site Reliability Engineer role with Blackstone / BXTI. While the interviewers were generally professional and the technical discussions were relevant, the overall interview process was excessive and unnecessarily drawn out. The process involved multiple stages, including recruiter screening, a HackerRank assessment, technical interviews, HR discussions, level and compensation discussions, and further interviews with senior leaders across SRE, Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Cloud, and Platform Engineering. In total, the process reached around seven stages before I was ultimately told they had decided to proceed with another candidate. For an SRE role, I understand the need for technical assessment and cultural fit, but a process of this length felt disproportionate. It required significant preparation, scheduling, and time investment, while the level expectations and remaining stages were not made clear early enough. At one point, the role appeared to shift from Senior-level consideration to Associate-level discussion, which added further uncertainty. The technical interviews themselves covered relevant topics such as production incidents, observability, regional outages, CloudWatch, CI/CD, Terraform, Linux, hotfixes, rollback, and platform reliability. However, the repeated rounds and extended process made the experience feel inefficient from a candidate perspective. Pros * Professional interviewers * Relevant technical topics * Good exposure to different parts of the engineering organisation Cons * Excessive number of stages * Process felt too long for the role * Level expectations could have been clarified much earlier * Significant time investment without a clear final path * More transparency needed around the number of interviews and decision timeline Advice to candidates Be prepared for a long and demanding process with multiple technical and senior-level discussions. Make sure to ask early how many stages remain, what each stage is assessing, and what level you are actually being considered for. Advice to management The process would benefit from being significantly streamlined. Seven stages for an SRE role feels excessive and creates a poor candidate experience, especially when level expectations and timelines are not clearly communicated upfront.