I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Arista Networks (Burnaby, BC) in Sep 2015
Interview
I found the advertisement on LinkedIn and then asked one of my friend (working there) to forward my resume. I got a response from the recruiter within an hour. He asked for a time to set up an on-site technical interview. I took about 10 days of time to get prepared. The interview process was good. Most of the questions are covered by the glassdoor reviews. I did pass the technical test. I think I could have passed with a little more preparation. They look for deep understanding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The interviewer started with some small talk. Talked a little bit about my research work. Then went on with technical questions. Openned terminal on his computer. First he asked about if I know anything about zombie process. Then he asked about ‘malloc’. Then he told me, how would I implement a malloc like function in a separate memory space like some PCI connected to the main memory. The question was not very clear to me. I tried to explain how I could implement that memory over the extra connected memory. I am not sure if he was very happy about it.
Then he went onto his terminal. A C program was there. Just two lines
char* str1 = “string1”;
char str2[] = “string2”;
He told me to print the two strings. I did and then he told me to change the ‘t’ in both of the string to ‘T’. I told him that we cannot change the first string. He asked me why? I could not tell it clearly. I just showed him that, it generates a segmentation fault. I told it might be in some place in the memory which we cannot edit. He kept asking the question to prove my point. Then gave me hint and let me print the addresses of main, some variables which have higher value sounded like they are in the stack part. Printing the values of main showed very low address which shows that, it’s in the code segment. The char* variable was in a little more higher address which clearly shows that, it is in the data segment, which suggests that we can not edit anything on the data segment. So need to know what’s more there in the data segment?
Then he showed some networking terms
ip
ipconfig
ping
some more (around 6-7) which I forgot. He told me to explain in short what these functions do.
Then he asked me to write a script on python, which will read a file and add all the numbers on the third column. He showed me the file with cat command. It as a space separated text like
1 7 8 9 6 5 5 0 8 8
4 5 7 2 4 6 8 9 0 7
4 5 1 7 9 6 0 3 8 0
1 7 8 9 4 6 8 0 8 6 9 8 6 9
7 0 7 6 4 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
4 5 6 7 8 9 1 0 1 3 4 8 3 5
1 7 8 9 4 6 8 0 8 6 9 8 6 9
Then he gave me a problem on linked list. The problem was to delete all the nodes with a particular number on it. I just needed to write the main function and call that from the main file. The structure and main file was already written. I just needed to add the function prototype to the *.h file.
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
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Arista Networks (Łódź, Lódz) in Jun 2026
Interview
Reached round 3 out of 4 planned, one was coding task, two live coding sessions. Linux development background was highly expected. Performance optimized approach was tested, specially oriented for hardware with lots of resources. I had a problem to properly understand reqruiting person during round 3, voice was not clear for me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
List implementation, bits counting, tre traversal.
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!