Site Reliability Engineer - Observability

As a Site Reliability Engineer focusing on Observability at Wolt, your primary responsibilities will include enhancing our observability platform and tools, ensuring they meet the growing needs of our users. You'll work on architecting, building, and maintaining our observability stack, focusing on reliability and efficiency. Additionally, you'll be responsible for championing observability best practices, participating in on-call rotations for incident resolution, and contributing to open-source projects.

To succeed as a Site Reliability Engineer - Observability at Wolt, you should have proven experience in Software Engineering, SRE, or similar fields, with a strong focus on observability and scaling large systems. Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, development experience in languages like Go or Python, and hands-on expertise with observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana are crucial. Additionally, knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP and experience managing distributed systems will set you up for success.

In your role as a Site Reliability Engineer - Observability at Wolt, you'll work with a diverse range of tools and technologies, including OpenTelemetry, DataDog, Prometheus, Mimir, Elasticsearch, Grafana, and Jaeger. You'll also manage cloud infrastructure with Kubernetes and utilize Docker containers. Your experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Ansible will be valuable in streamlining our cloud environments.

Collaboration is a cornerstone of the Performance and Observability Team at Wolt. You'll work alongside colleagues with diverse backgrounds, bringing different perspectives to the table as you tackle observability challenges. Regular feedback sessions and open communication will allow you to share ideas and improve processes. Additionally, partnering with engineers at DoorDash opens up opportunities to collaborate on impactful projects, ensuring everyone's voice is heard and valued.

As a Site Reliability Engineer - Observability at Wolt, you'll have vast opportunities for growth. You'll be encouraged to take ownership of key initiatives, allowing you to develop your leadership skills. Additionally, our commitment to continuous learning means you'll be supported in honing your expertise through various projects, conferences, and open-source contributions, positioning you for advancement in your career.

Observability is crucial in site reliability engineering because it provides insights into the health and performance of systems. By effectively monitoring and analyzing metrics, logs, and traces, you can quickly identify issues, forecast outages, and ensure systems operate reliably. When answering, emphasize how observability allows teams to maintain service continuity, enhance user satisfaction, and ultimately drive business success.

Discuss tools you've used, such as Prometheus, Grafana, or DataDog, and explain how they improved monitoring and troubleshooting in your past projects. Give examples of how these tools helped you reduce downtime or enhance visibility into system performance. Highlight any metrics or data you can share that demonstrates their impact.

During a production incident, I follow a structured approach that includes quickly assessing the situation, collaborating with team members, and diagnosing the underlying issue. In your response, mention the importance of communication and how you employed observability tools to aid in identifying the root cause. Illustrating how you resolved the incident and the lessons learned will provide a well-rounded answer.

To ensure reliability and scalability, I focus on continual improvements and performance monitoring. Discuss practices such as capacity planning, load testing, and regularly reviewing the architecture of the observability stack. Highlight your commitment to automation, using tools like Terraform to manage infrastructure changes without downtime.

Best practices for application instrumentation include consistent logging, using standardized formats, and ensuring metrics capture meaningful events. Always mention the importance of setting alerts for critical thresholds. Demonstrating an understanding of how to instrument for both performance and troubleshooting will showcase your expertise.

I view feedback as an opportunity for growth. During discussions, I actively listen to my peers’ perspectives and assess how their insights could enhance the project. Share an example illustrating how you incorporated feedback that led to a positive change or improvement in observability tools or practices.

Identify a specific challenge, such as integrating new observability tools or dealing with scaling issues. Describe the steps you took to investigate the problem and the solution you implemented, emphasizing resourcefulness and collaboration with other teams. This answer will demonstrate both your problem-solving skills and your resilience in a challenging environment.

Automation is key to effective observability as it reduces manual errors and increases efficiency. Discuss how you automate routine checks, incident responses, and deployment processes, highlighting any specific tools or scripts you’ve developed to enhance observability. Use examples to demonstrate how automation improved your team's overall responsiveness.

When managing multiple initiatives, I prioritize based on business impact and urgency. Discuss how you assess the potential benefits of each task and involve team members in decision-making. This will show your strategic thinking in aligning observability initiatives with business goals and user experience considerations.

I’ve contributed to several open-source projects related to observability by providing fixes, improvements, or documentation. Share specifics about the projects and the impact of your contributions. Emphasize your passion for community involvement and how these experiences fostered your skills in observability practices.