I'm an SRE-SE and regular do phone interviews for SRE-SE candidates.
While I do tend to spend more of the interview time talking about sysadmin tools, operating systems, networking, databases, security and troubleshooting, I still expect candidates to have reasonably good coding chops.
The difference is that the coding questions tend to be more task-oriented or procedural (i.e. log processing, building automation pipelines, implementing standard unix cli tools, etc.), rather than the algorithmically challenging or math-oriented problems that we'd usually ask SWE candidates.
Both the SE and SWE side SRE candidates need to be able to design and reason about large systems, making trade-offs between performance (especially latency), redundancy and cost.
Thanks. Is being well-versed in C a prerequisite for the role then? I'm imagining you need to be fluent in at least one statically compiled language or ???
In my interviews you code in whichever language you prefer. Some interviewers will ask you to use a specific language that's mentioned on your resume. In general I think that if you show strong coding skills in some language, it is believed that you won't have much trouble teaching yourself the languages your team uses (typically some subset of C++, Java, Python, Go, Borgmon).
