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Axon - Senior Site Reliability Engineer I - Recruiter Screen Prep ​

Position: Senior Site Reliability Engineer I
Company: Axon
Location: Remote anywhere in Australia
Interview Type: First round - Recruiter screen (light & general questions)

🎯 Role Overview ​

Axon is on a mission to "Protect Life" through their ecosystem of devices and cloud software for safety and justice. As an SRE, you'll be building foundational platforms and tools for mission-critical cloud-native services, enabling engineering teams across the organization.

Key Focus Areas:

  • Building robust foundational platforms/tools
  • Cloud-native SRE best practices
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • Observability and automation
  • Supporting engineering teams (DevX focus)

🏢 About Axon ​

Mission: Protect Life - focused on society's most critical safety and justice issues
Culture Keywords from JD:

  • "Force for Good"
  • "We connect with candor and care"
  • "Diverse perspectives"
  • "Take ownership and drive real change"
  • "Fast-paced, challenging and meaningful"

Tech Environment:

  • Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS)
  • Kubernetes (AKS, EKS)
  • CI/CD automation
  • Mission-critical cloud-native services

Note: Australian government security clearance required (or ability to obtain - AUS citizenship required)

📊 Your Experience Match ​

✅ Strong Alignments ​

  1. Cloud Infrastructure & Kubernetes (Domain - 2 years)

    • Migrated from AWS ECS to Kubernetes supporting 100+ microservices
    • Built Kubernetes-based platform enabling 20+ product teams to deploy independently
    • Experience with AWS (can transfer to Azure/multi-cloud)

  2. Developer Experience & Platform Engineering (Viator - Current)

    • Autonomous engineer working on cross-domain projects to improve developer experience
    • Visualized project-based metrics in Backstage
    • Built AI Slack bot reducing support response time by 50%
    • Architected GitLab token automation workflow

  3. Observability & Monitoring (Multiple roles)

    • Integrated ELK, SonarQube into platform pipelines (Domain)
    • Migrated from New Relic to Datadog, reduced costs 45% (Envato)
    • Integrated PagerDuty workflows with Datadog (Envato)
    • Added custom OpenTelemetry instrumentation (Envato)

  4. CI/CD Automation (All roles)

    • Migrated 15+ teams to GitOps workflows (Domain)
    • Reduced change lead time by 92% with automated CI/CD (illion)
    • Containerized CI/CD pipelines (Envato)
    • Experience with GitLab, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Jenkins, Buildkite

  5. Infrastructure as Code (Multiple roles)

    • AWS CDK, Terraform experience listed in skills
    • Migrated entire AWS environment to IaC with Terraform (Avinet)
    • Built fault-tolerant, self-healing platforms (Domain)

🔄 Transferable Skills ​

  • Python scripting - Have Python listed in skills, can emphasize for automation/tooling
  • Security & Compliance - Led SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 audits (illion)
  • Incident Management - Established incident management processes, reduced MTTR by 70% (Avinet)

📈 Areas to Develop ​

  • Azure experience - Primary AWS background, but have multi-cloud awareness
  • Go/C#/Java - Have Python, TypeScript, Bash; willing to learn Go (common in SRE tools)

Vision ​

Empowering developers with an exceptional experience on every platform.

Mission ​

Our mission is to continuously improve the developer experience across all platforms by providing the tools, resources, and support that enable developers to do their best work.

Goals, Challenges, Current State, Tech Vision, Initiatives, Quarterly Roadmap

💬 Recruiter Screen Questions & Talking Points ​

1. "Tell me about yourself / Walk me through your resume" ​

Your Answer (2-3 minutes):

“I’m a Senior Platform engineer with over 13 years of experience building secure, scalable, and highly available platforms. My focus is to enable engineering organizations to ship high-quality features safely, quickly, and confidently—by building reliable platforms, championing modern SRE culture, and empowering teams through autonomy, observability, and strong engineering practices.

Across the roles at Viator, Domain, Envato, I’ve:

  • delivered cross-domain platform capabilities (observability, CI/CD, Kubernetes, internal developer portals),
  • championed operational excellence (maintaining 99.9%+ uptime, SLO rollout, incident management),
  • automated developer workflows to reduce friction and accelerate delivery,
  • influenced engineering culture through tooling, documentation, and standards.

What excites me about Axon is the mission-driven focus on protecting life through technology. Building reliable and resilient systems that have real-world impact aligns perfectly with what I find meaningful in my work.”

2. "Why are you interested in Axon / this role?" ​

Your Answer:

"Three main reasons:

First, the mission resonates deeply with me. 'Protecting Life' is powerful—I want my technical work to contribute to something essential in public safety and justice. Building services that directly impact society is incredibly motivating.

Second, the role itself is a perfect match for my experience and interests. I've spent the last few years building practices and platforms that enable engineering teams to work more effectively—exactly what this role focuses on. At Domain, I built a Kubernetes platform for 20 plus teams, and at Viator, I'm focused on developer experience improvements. The emphasis on foundational platforms, observability, and empowering engineers aligns with what I do best.

Third, the technical environment is exciting. You're working with cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes, IaC, and modern SRE practices. I appreciate that Axon values taking ownership, driving change, and cultivating craft—that autonomy and continuous improvement mindset matches how I work."

3. "What are you looking for in your next role?" ​

Your Answer:

"I'm looking for three things:

First, meaningful impact—working on systems that matter to society, not just business metrics. Axon's services for public safety and justice fit that perfectly.

Second, technical growth in cross-functional space. I want to deepen my expertise in cloud reliability, observability at scale, and platform engineering. Working across the entire engineering organization to influence architectural patterns is exactly the kind of challenge I'm seeking.

Third, a collaborative environment where I can both contribute my experience in Kubernetes, CI/CD, and observability, while learning from a strong SRE division. The mention of 'connecting with candor and care' in your job description tells me Axon values that collaborative approach."

4. "Why are you leaving Viator / looking for a new opportunity?" ​

Your Answer (Keep positive and forward-looking):

"Viator recently made the entire Australian engineering platform division redundant as part of a broader organizational restructuring. While that was unexpected, I’m choosing to view it as an opportunity to take the next step in my career.

I really enjoyed my work at Viator—especially the cross-functional developer experience projects and the autonomy I had to solve meaningful problems. So I’m now looking for a role where I can continue that journey, have a broader influence, and contribute to an organization that invests in reliability, observability, and engineering excellence. Axon stands out because the mission is meaningful, the technical challenges are real, and the role aligns strongly with where I can deliver my best impact."

5. "What's your experience with Kubernetes / Cloud platforms?" ​

Your Answer:

"I have extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production environments. At Domain, I led the migration from AWS ECS to Kubernetes, which now supports over 100 microservices. I built the platform from the ground up—setting up GitOps workflows with Argo CD, implementing SLO monitoring with Helm charts, and integrating security and observability tooling into the deployment pipelines.

The platform enabled 20 plus product teams to deploy independently while maintaining 99.9% uptime for the core infrastructure. I also designed standardized workflows and documentation to make it easy for teams to self-service.

For cloud platforms, my primary experience is with AWS—I've worked with ECS, EKS, CloudFront, Lambda, and built infrastructure with AWS CDK and Terraform. While I haven't worked with Azure in production yet, I understand the core concepts transfer well, and I'm excited to expand to multi-cloud environments. The architectural patterns for reliability, observability, and automation are consistent across platforms."

6. "Tell me about a time you had to solve a complex infrastructure problem" ​

Your Answer (STAR format):

Situation: At Domain, we were running 100+ microservices on AWS ECS, and teams were experiencing scaling bottlenecks, deployment delays, and limited observability.

Task: I was tasked with migrating the entire platform to Kubernetes to improve scalability, reliability, and developer experience while maintaining zero downtime for production workloads.

Action: I approached it systematically:

  • First, I architected the Kubernetes environment with high availability and security in mind
  • Built reusable SLO Helm charts so teams could easily adopt reliability monitoring
  • Migrated services incrementally, starting with non-critical workloads to validate the approach
  • Integrated observability (ELK), security (Orca, CrowdStrike), and quality tools (SonarQube) directly into CI/CD pipelines
  • Created comprehensive documentation and conducted knowledge-sharing sessions

Result: Successfully migrated 100+ microservices with zero customer-facing incidents. Platform uptime reached 99.9%, and we achieved 40% SLO adoption within 3 months. Most importantly, 20+ product teams could now deploy independently, which drastically improved velocity."

7. "What's your experience with observability and monitoring?" ​

Your Answer:

"Observability is something I'm passionate about because it's critical for running reliable systems. I have experience across the full observability stack—APM, logging, metrics, and tracing.

At Envato, I led the migration from New Relic to Datadog, which reduced observability costs by 45%. I integrated PagerDuty workflows with Datadog to enable data-driven decision-making during incidents, improved incident resolution time by 40%. I also added custom OpenTelemetry instrumentation to critical code paths to improve application troubleshooting.

At Domain, I integrated Elastic Stack into the platform pipelines for centralized logging and built SLO monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana. The key was making observability actionable—not just collecting data, but enabling engineers to quickly understand what's wrong and how to fix it.

I've worked with PagerDuty, ELK, New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana in production environments."

8. "How do you approach CI/CD and automation?" ​

Your Answer:

"I believe CI/CD automation should be invisible to developers—it should just work, be fast, and provide clear feedback.

At illion, I designed and implemented an automated CI/CD pipeline that reduced change lead time from 2 hours to 10 minutes—a 92% improvement. That dramatically increased deployment frequency and confidence.

At Domain, I migrated 15+ teams to GitOps workflows using Argo CD, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions. The key was standardizing workflows while allowing flexibility for team-specific needs.

At Viator, I recently architected a GitLab token automation workflow that reclaimed 10% of team velocity by removing manual token management overhead.

My philosophy is: automate the repetitive, secure by default, fail fast with clear feedback, and document for self-service."

9. "Do you have experience with Infrastructure as Code?" ​

Your Answer:

"Absolutely. IaC is fundamental to everything I build. I have production experience with both Terraform and AWS CDK.

At Avinet, I led the migration of our entire AWS environment to Terraform to achieve audit compliance. This gave us reproducibility, version control, and the ability to review infrastructure changes just like code.

At Domain, I used Terraform and Helm charts extensively for the Kubernetes platform. I focused on building flexible, testable IaC modules that teams could reuse.

I'm also familiar with AWS CDK from my recent work and understand the tradeoffs between declarative (Terraform/CloudFormation) and imperative (CDK) approaches. I believe IaC is essential for operational management of cloud systems—it enables consistent provisioning, reduces human error, and makes disaster recovery straightforward."

10. "What interests you about working remotely in Australia for Axon?" ​

Your Answer:

"I'm currently based in Adelaide and have been working remotely successfully for several years. I appreciate that Axon offers remote flexibility across Australia—it shows trust in your engineers to deliver results regardless of location.

For a mission-critical SRE role, remote work actually aligns well because infrastructure and platform work often requires deep focus time, and modern tooling makes collaboration seamless. I'm experienced with asynchronous communication, comprehensive documentation, and proactive updates—all critical for remote success.

I'm also excited about being part of a distributed team because it often means better documentation and stronger written communication culture, which benefits everyone."

11. "What are your salary expectations?" ​

Your Answer (Research-backed, flexible):

"Based on my research for Senior SRE roles in Australia with my level of experience, I'm looking at $170,000 base, depending on the total compensation package including bonus, equity, and benefits.

However, I'm flexible and more interested in finding the right fit with Axon's mission and team. I'm open to discussing what's appropriate for this role and Axon's compensation structure."

Note: Adjust based on your research and requirements. LinkedIn shows 58 applicants, so competition is moderate.

12. "Do you have Australian citizenship / security clearance?" ​

Your Answer:

"Yes, I'm an Australian citizen based in Adelaide, so I meet the citizenship requirement. I don't currently hold government security clearance, but I understand it's required for this role and I'm willing to go through the clearance process. I've successfully completed compliance and security audits before, including leading SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 audits at illion, so I'm familiar with rigorous security requirements."

13. "What questions do you have for me?" ​

Your Questions (Shows genuine interest and research):

  1. "Can you tell me more about the SRE team structure? How large is the team, and how do SREs typically collaborate with product engineering teams?"

    • Shows interest in team dynamics and working relationships

  2. "What does 'mission-critical' mean in practice for Axon's cloud services? What are the SLOs/uptime targets you're working toward?"

    • Demonstrates SRE mindset and understanding of reliability

  3. "You mentioned the role will reach the entire engineering organization—can you share more about how SRE influences architectural patterns across product teams?"

    • Shows strategic thinking and interest in platform engineering impact

  4. "What's the tech stack like? I saw Azure/AWS and Kubernetes mentioned—is Axon primarily Azure-based, or is it multi-cloud?"

    • Practical technical curiosity

  5. "What does success look like in the first 6 months for someone in this role?"

    • Shows goal-orientation and desire to deliver value

  6. "How does Axon support learning and development, especially for someone looking to deepen their SRE expertise?"

    • References the L&D benefit mentioned in JD

  7. "What's the timeline for the rest of the interview process?"

    • Practical logistics question

  8. "What has kept you here as long as you have been? Or what do you love about working here?"

  9. "Is there anything you are looking for in the ideal candidate that you have not yet heard from me today?"

🎯 Key Talking Points to Emphasize ​

  1. Mission Alignment: You're motivated by meaningful work that protects life
  2. Platform/DevX Focus: Your recent work is all about enabling engineering teams
  3. Production Kubernetes Experience: 100+ microservices, 20+ teams, 99.9% uptime
  4. Observability Expertise: Full stack experience with cost optimization
  5. CI/CD & Automation: Proven track record of reducing lead times and improving velocity
  6. Autonomy & Ownership: You've worked independently and driven real change
  7. Australian Citizen: Based in Adelaide, meet clearance requirements

⚠️ Potential Concerns & How to Address ​

Concern: "You don't have Azure experience" ​

Response: "That's true—my production experience is primarily AWS. However, the core concepts of cloud reliability, IaC, Kubernetes, and SRE practices are platform-agnostic. I'm a fast learner and have experience picking up new platforms quickly. In fact, transitioning to Azure would be a growth opportunity I'm excited about."

Concern: "Your recent roles have been short (Viator 6-7 months)" ​

Response: "I joined Viator looking for a platform engineering focus, which I've gotten. However, after settling in, I realized I'm seeking something more mission-driven and reliability-focused at scale. Axon's SRE role offers that combination of impact and technical depth that aligns with my long-term career goals."

Concern: "You haven't mentioned Go experience specifically" ​

Response: "I have strong Python scripting experience and have worked with TypeScript and Bash. While I haven't written production Go, I understand it's common in SRE tooling. I'm comfortable learning new languages—I've picked up multiple languages throughout my career based on the needs of the platform."

📝 Additional Notes ​

  • Tone: Confident, collaborative, mission-focused (Australian professional style)
  • Keep it conversational: This is a recruiter screen, not a technical deep-dive
  • Be authentic: Ground every answer in your actual resume experiences
  • Show enthusiasm: The mission and role should excite you
  • Ask questions: Engage with the recruiter—this is a two-way conversation

✅ Pre-Interview Checklist ​

  • [ ] Review this prep guide the morning of the interview
  • [ ] Review your resume—be ready to talk about any bullet point
  • [ ] Research Axon's recent news/products (spend 15 minutes)
  • [ ] Prepare your workspace (quiet environment, good internet, headphones)
  • [ ] Have questions ready to ask
  • [ ] Test video/audio if virtual interview
  • [ ] Be ready 5 minutes early

Good luck, Lucas! You've got the experience, and Axon's mission is a great fit. Be yourself, show your passion for reliable systems, and emphasize your platform engineering focus. 🚀