I interviewed at Arista Networks (Vancouver, BC) in Jun 2017
Interview
A software engineer sat next to me and asked me a couple questions. The questions were in general easy but having someone watching over your shoulder as you code is a lot of pressure that just usually doesn't happen in the real world.
The interviewer was just waiting for me to make a mistake so he can say something. We get it, you know how to solve the problem because you've done it a million times, but give people a chance to solve it on their own. I wasn't even allowed to use gdb to debug my solution, he just wanted me to one shot answer the problem on my first try which is difficult under that kind of pressure.
At the end he spent about 5 minutes asking me how a void function returns a parameter and I must have said using pointers at least 3 times, but he just kept going on and on until in the end he said "the answer is pointers". I almost face palmed through my face and in to the wall behind me. I think the interviewer was pretty junior and just finished his internship judging from what he thought were tough questions and the way he spoke. Overall it was a very negative experience because even though the questions were quite easy, the interviewer made it very difficult.
There is no way this kind of "watch over your shoulder" interview process leads to finding quality engineers. You either need to start here as an intern or you need to code really quickly under pressure and be very prepared for the exact question they will ask. Good luck with that Arista.
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