Everything you need to identify an elite engineer

The Crucible (launch product)

The Crucible by SREForge is a game that elite engineers love

The Crucible is a platform that presents candidate engineers with real world challenges:

  1. The Proxify Challenge: Build a proxy service that proxies to multiple backends with different APIs, while offering a single API to the customers. The backends are terrible, brittle, and slow (sometimes slower than the SLA); the clients are aggressive and impatient. The candidates are placed in a perfect storm with an SLA inversion. The expectation is that customers don’t experience the pain of unreliable services in a high-load environment.
  2. (In progress) The Exchangefy Challenge: We have overseas customers and need to show them our prices in their currencies by pulling rates from an API at scale. The challenge here is mostly about money; every request costs money, and not all currencies are created equal. Is the candidate making or burning money? Are we even showing the checkout to the customers at all?
  3. (In progress) The S3Migrafy Challenge: Migrate files from multiple S3 buckets to another bucket in a single region, live. At the time time, update the references in a MySQL database that gets accessed concurrently by a legacy service, respecting business constraints, and accounting for potential conflicts and failures (and all the hacks the company did over time that we don’t remember anymore, nor are documented anywhere). Useful for filtering only senior candidates and above, as the majority of them would fail this challenge. The estimated completion time is three hours or more, depending on the candidate’s seniority.

Crucible Game Features:

  • Full industry-standard CI/CD gitlab environment providing the candidate with everything needed to deploy an application to production
  • Ability to define statsD metrics for observing production behaviour, and access to Canary logs
  • Instant feedback from Canary on deployment promotion success
  • Evaluation across 3 dimensions: correctness, high-performance, and reliability
  • High load environment able to simulate extreme production loads seen only in the largest cloud service providers (thousands of requests per second per instance)

Post Game Candidate Evaluation:

  • Ability to observe candidate deployments and results in real time
  • Customizeable candidate scoring
  • Reporting on candidate traits and behaviours observed
  • Unicorn detector so you never miss a must-hire Audience: Engineering managers seeking the elite engineers needed to support high-load, high-availability environments Demo video:

The Candidate Experience

<Screenshot 1>

Login, absorb the task, set up your environment and canary metrics, and build your solution

<Screenshot 2>

Deploy to production, experience load and constraints

<screenshot 3>

The effects of scale on production deployments

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Feedback that helps the candidate iterate, or die

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Candidate evaluations that make go / no go decisions obvious

vs. Leetcode/HackerRank:

The Crucible experience hits differently than the usual coding test slog. Take it from the candidates:

  • Candidates find it fun: “It’s exciting how a real job interview process can nerd snipe you so easily.”

  • It’s the real world, not a whiteboard: “it brought to the forefront more of my skills than would ever have been shown in a whiteboard interview.”

  • It’s a game candidates want to play, not a test they fear: “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!”

Example evaluations:

Evaluation 1:

Evaluation 2:

Evaluation 3:

What the Candidates Say

Testimonials:

Stats: Customer logos:

Case study: