I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Arista Networks in Jun 2011
Interview
- Algorithm analysis and design skills need to be current.
- API/Interface design has to be generic to take care of broader conditions.
- They will continue to herd you towards right answers but depending on the experience level, there is an expectation to be in the mould for independent thinking.
- They let u know the outcome of the interview immediately after the f2f.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Question from an Engineer:
Design API interface for stack. The stack should be able to take as input a wide variety of data types: it could range from byte sized to an n-byte sized structure
Question from Hiring Manager:
1. How is the NULL pointer implemented on a linux system? What is the implication of mapping BSS to the Virtual Memory Segment 0?
Question from Hiring Manager:
2. A snippet of http internet server daemon involving socket(), bind(), listen() followed by while loop (which does accept(), process of http request and close() on the accepted fd). Any subsequent http request from a client is blocked till the erstwhile request is completed. Discuss the reasons as to why the server daemon throughput would get affected assuming that the loop to accept and service the request would get executed in say 10ms in the local machine running the server.
What is the throughput for this server in terms of requests/sec? What are the reasons why the throughput would get affected? Assuming that 1% of the clients cause a 1 sec delay, calculate the throughput.
What is typically the wait till for the socket tcp con block to be removed
( length of inactivity time)?
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Arista Networks in Jun 2026
Interview
Pros:
Great initial approach – the recruiter thoroughly checked my GitHub profile and projects before the interview, which is very uncommon and shows they do their homework.
Cons:
A major mismatch between the job description ("Software Engineer C++") and the actual interview reality. The technical stage on CoderPad strictly tests bare-metal C98 skills: raw pointers, manual bitwise operations, and packing bytes into 64-bit integers. If you are accustomed to modern C++ (RAII, templates, safe memory management), this will feel like a massive step backward. Additionally, the time expectations for live low-level bit-shifting were unrealistic, to the point where the interviewer started solving the task themselves.
Interview was kind and not stressful, just minor mismatch of naming
Pretty good, not too complicated, was comfortable. Mostly LC questions, and was easy enough that you should be able to do it after doing NC150. good luck for the interview!
Starts with online test, then three rounds of technical interviews follow.
Not a lot of discussion, just go straight to the technical challenges which have to be solved in time