Handling four hundred tickets is not a story. Removing the class of ticket is. We go through your incident history and find the two or three times you changed something permanent: a fix that closed a recurring alert, a monitor you added before anyone asked, a manual step you scripted away. That is the resume.
SLOs, error budgets, toil, blast radius and postmortem discipline are concepts you have lived without naming. Panels test whether you can define an SLI for a service you supported and defend the threshold. We practise on your own systems, so your answers stay concrete instead of quoting the Google SRE book back at the interviewer.
The screen most support engineers fail is coding. Not algorithms at a competitive level, but writing a clean Python script that parses logs, calls an API, and handles failure. We set a fixed weekly output, usually small automation of tasks you already do manually, so the practice produces both skill and portfolio at once.
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Yes, but not without changing that. SRE hiring assumes you will automate your way out of manual work, so a coding screen is standard even at infrastructure-heavy companies. The realistic path is to start automating inside your current support role: log parsing, health checks, ticket enrichment. That work is small enough to ship, and it doubles as the evidence the panel asks for.
They test differently. SRE loops lean on systems reasoning, debugging under load, and reliability practice, which favours people with real production exposure. DevOps loops lean on pipelines, IaC and delivery tooling. If your strongest history is outage handling and root cause work, SRE is the shorter path. If it is deployments, environments and release coordination, DevOps fits better.
By going deep instead of broad. The round usually gives you a symptom and expects you to narrow it methodically: what changed, what does the dependency graph look like, how would you confirm each hypothesis. Depth on one system teaches that method perfectly well. What loses the round is jumping to a known fix from your product instead of showing how you would isolate the cause.
They help you get read, not hired. A Kubernetes certification signals that you have handled the tooling and can be a reasonable filter for a recruiter with no technical context. It does not substitute for being able to explain what you would check when a pod is crash looping in a cluster you did not build. We use certifications to unblock screening, never as the core of the plan.
