The first Google phone screening for SRE candidates is usually done by a technical recruiter who doesn&#x27;t have extensive technical knowledge but at least knows the basics and is able to talk with you about the answers you give (albeit not in as much detail). It&#x27;s supposed to be easy and it&#x27;s to filter out people who lie on their CV or really don&#x27;t have broad superficial knowledge.<p>The follow up phone interviews are what really matters (before the onsite of course) with actual engineers and go more in-depth with coding questions (among other things) at least.<p>I remember my recruiter was a really knowledgeable guy and he knew his stuff even though he wasn&#x27;t an engineer. We had a nice chat and he was able to keep up with my (basic, obviously) responses of how TCP works, how to implement inode-based filesystems or whatever information you can read out of a stat call... Nothing too fancy but still it didn&#x27;t sound like rehearsed script to me.