The Google SRE book defines principles that appear in interviews.
Core principles:
- Embracing risk: % reliability is wrong target. Define acceptable risk
- SLOs over SLAs: Internal targets should be stricter than customer promises
- Eliminating toil: Automate repetitive work to focus on engineering
- Monitoring distributed systems: Symptoms over causes
- Release engineering: Treat deployment as an engineering problem
- Simplicity: Complex systems fail in complex ways
Interview tip: Read at least the summary chapters. Your interviewer expects familiarity with these concepts, especially at Google.