Standard process. Met with a recruiter, they asked about my background and sent me a coding challenge. I completed the challenge and got called for a second interview with them. We did some live coding in a terminal about 5 or so mini coding challenges: what will the output be, data structures, etc. Made it to the third round, met with the manager of the team I believe. More advanced coding challenges, again in a terminal. I was told after that round they were not interested in moving forward with me as a candidate. For that last round, it wasn't quite as difficult as balancing/insertion on a red-black tree but it was binary tree manipulation based. leetcode or hackerrank medium/hard level probably.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. What is the output of this code?
2. How many bytes in this data structure?
3. Various coding challenges
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