I applied through college or university. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Arista Networks (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2015
Interview
I applied through my school website, and within one day an employee emailed me to do a phone interview. The phone interview was scheduled for about an hour in the afternoon. After asking about classes, some projects, and technologies, I did a coding challenge involving binary trees that was relatively straightforward. The interviewer was polite and friendly.
At the end of the interview, the interviewer told me that I would be getting an offer and promptly sent out more information. I was very impressed by the turnaround speed.
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