This document provides an overview of how Byteboard’s Site Reliability Engineering Assessment differs from the Software Engineering Assessment. It is intended to provide context for individuals who are already familiar with Byteboard’s Software Engineering Assessment.

Overview

The Site Reliability Engineering assessment has an explicit focus on assessing the skills required to create scalable and highly reliable software systems. It differs from Byteboard's general Software Engineering assessment by providing signal for domain-specific skills including Distributed Systems, Performance, Networking, and Monitoring while removing runtime complexity questions that previously informed the Pattern Matching & Intuition skill.

Content Changes

Part 1 - Design Document	Part 2 - Coding Segment
Part 1 has an increased focus on designing a scalable and reliable software system. Runtime complexity-focused questions asked in comments by ‘collaborators’ have been replaced with questions assessing domain-specific skills.	Identical to Software Engineering assessment.

Domain-Specific Skills

Four new skills have been introduced to assess highly requested Systems & SRE focused Software Engineering skills. While the assessment is still able to evaluate signal on Basic Algorithms & Data Structures, the assessment no longer evaluates Pattern Matching & Intuition.

Skills	Baseline expectations for displaying desired skill
Distributed Systems	The candidate can understand and critically reason about distributed systems.
Performance	The candidate is able to recommend optimizations to improve application performance and scalability.
Networking	The candidate is able to provide recommendations to improve user experience despite networking issues or faulty connections.
Monitoring	The candidate is able to provide recommendations for how to design metrics and monitor the health of the system.
Pattern matching & intuition	Candidate leverages basic knowledge of algorithms and data structures.