PagerDuty is the canonical incident management platform — when your prod system breaks, PagerDuty is what wakes the on-call engineer. The interview emphasizes reliability engineering, 24/7 system design, and the human-systems aspects of handling alerts at scale.
Process
Recruiter screen → 60-minute coding phone (DSA medium) → onsite virtual: 2 coding, 1 system design, 1 craft deep-dive, 1 behavioral. Cycle: 3–4 weeks.
What they actually ask
- Design an alert routing system with escalation policies and overrides
- Design a notification fanout: SMS, voice call, push, email — at sub-second latency
- Design a status page that aggregates signal from multiple integrations
- Coding: medium DSA, often graph or tree problems
- Behavioral: ownership, navigating ambiguity, the customer-trust framing
Levels and comp (2026)
- SE II: $150K–$185K total
- Senior SE: $220K–$280K
- Staff: $300K–$400K
- Principal: $420K–$560K
Prep priorities
- Read about Tier-1 reliability practices: SRE workbook, Google SRE book
- Be fluent in JVM languages (Scala dominates the codebase) or willing to ramp up
- Understand telephony integrations and the realities of carrier delivery latency
Frequently Asked Questions
Is PagerDuty remote-friendly?
Hybrid in San Francisco, Toronto, Atlanta, and Lisbon. Many engineering roles are fully remote within the supported countries.
How does PagerDuty compare to Opsgenie?
PagerDuty is the dominant brand; Opsgenie (Atlassian) is the budget enterprise alternative. PagerDuty has stronger US enterprise penetration and richer API ecosystem.
What is the engineering culture like?
Reliability-obsessed. Senior engineers do real on-call. Outages are studied with rigor. Strong post-mortem and blame-free culture.