SREForge
To find an elite engineer, give them an SLA and production load.
Elite engineering is about outcomes, not tools, coding languages, or AI. In the real world, an engineer receives a problem, an SLA, and production load. Why should the interview be any different?
Stop Torturing Engineers
Finding elite engineers today is a time-intensive process that is both boring and needlessly stressful for candidates. Every company has hacked together its own combination of live coding pressure tests and whiteboard exercises. Neither resembles the actual process of great engineering.
And now, AI is simultaneously a required skill and a cheat code for hiring tests. Standard coding assessments can no longer tell you who is truly elite.
The Crucible
A game that elite engineers love, and gives mediocre engineers nowhere to hide.
The Crucible places candidates inside a full CI/CD production environment and gives them a real-world problem, an SLA, and relentless production load. The same conditions engineers face on the job, every single day.
Candidates get a complete GitLab environment, statsD metrics, Canary logs, and instant feedback from every deployment. You get a live window into how they think, and a scoring dashboard that makes go / no-go decisions obvious.
The candidate can use whatever language or AI copilot they'd like. Hand code the solution or go for a one shot with an open source LLM. Just remember: this is how they will treat production, and therefore, your customers.
Candidates define their own observability metrics and read the tea leaves of production execution in real time.
High-load environment with unexpected traffic patterns and production traps — thousands of requests per second.
Instant, actionable feedback from Canary. Live candidate scoring showing behaviours and iteration patterns.
Scoring that updates in real time as the candidate iterates.
See exactly how a candidate performed, and where to dig deeper in the follow-up.
Total transparency in the candidate's Git Repository.
The Proxify Challenge
Build a proxy service that unifies multiple unreliable, slow backends behind a single clean API — under aggressive client load and an SLA inversion. The expectation: customers never feel the pain of the backends.
The Exchangefy Challenge under construction
Show overseas customers prices in their local currencies by pulling live exchange rates at scale. Every API call costs money. Is the candidate making money or setting it on fire? Are customers even reaching checkout?
The S3Migrafy Challenge under construction
Migrate live S3 buckets across regions while a legacy service hits the database concurrently. Undocumented hacks, business constraints, and race conditions included. Designed to filter only the most senior candidates.
"It's exciting how a real job interview process can nerd snipe you so easily."
"It brought to the forefront more of my skills than would ever have been shown in a whiteboard interview."
"This was honestly the most fun assignment I had as far in my career, as I learned new things. It was also the one I spent the most time on — haha!"
See The Crucible in action.
We'll send you a link to run the trial yourself — no sales call required.
Request access info@sreforge.devsreforge.dev