Frame it as enabling velocity safely, not restricting it. Good guardrails make teams faster by giving them confidence to ship.
Strong answers mention: SLO-based approach (error budgets), automated testing and deployment guardrails, feature flags for progressive rollouts, investing in developer experience to make the safe path the easy path, and treating reliability as a feature. Best candidates frame this as a collaboration, not a conflict.
Senior SRE question. Tests philosophical alignment. The best SREs enable speed by reducing the cost of failure (canary deploys, feature flags, fast rollbacks), not by adding gates.