Apple Site Reliability Engineer interview questions

Apple reached out to me over LinkedIn a few months back, asking me to consider them for an SRE position with their Maps organization. They moved very quickly at first as I had an offer from Google on the table. Solid two-hour technical phone screen was followed by an invite to the Sunnyvale office. On-site was typical--6 or so interviews plus lunch with the recruiter. Lots of python on the whiteboard, lots of systems architecture and troubleshooting questions, and the same overemphasis on CS dogwhistle questions as Twitter and LinkedIn are known to use for Ops/SRE positions. Altogether a pretty decent round of interviews and I was very confident in my chances. The hiring manager seemed very stressed about headcount and growing their small team of less than ten engineers to something able to efficiently roll out improvements competitive with Google seemed like a serious challenge. This was the middle of December. Nothing for the next week or so before everyone disappeared for Christmas. Two other offers came in, but solid radio silence from Apple. In early January when everyone was back, I gave the recruiter a call and he seemed flustered and I think me might have even forgotten about me completely. Either way, he reassured me and said that my case was going in front of the hiring committee that week. Of course, I hear nothing back. While I will say that I wasn't seeing a great fit with Apple's odd culture and likely wouldn't have taken the offer considering the alternatives, I do feel the recruiter's lack of response is unprofessional at best and makes the company look like it doesn't even care about getting qualified talent into its internet services org at worst. Don't waste your time.

One short phone interview, one onsite, one additional phone interview, and then no response at all. Seriously. None. I emailed my recruiter thrice after said phone interview to ask about the status and got crickets in response. Extremely unprofessional. Interviews themselves were easy. Standard SRE interviews testing broad subject areas. Nothing particularly challenging or out of the ordinary.