Arista Networks

Role: Software Engineer

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: February 2024

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Offer

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 3 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures (Linked Lists, Trees, BST), Operating Systems, C/C++, Linux, System Design

Experience:

The candidate, with 6 years of experience, was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn for a Software Engineer role in Bengaluru. The interview rounds focused on basic Data Structures, Operating Systems, and C/C++ coding.

Technical Round 1 (DSA): Conducted on Google Meet with CoderPad. The interviewer directly presented DSA questions. The candidate had to complete pre-written functions. Questions included:

• A binary search tree variant where each node had a parent link: implement `findMin(node* root)`, `findNext(node* cur)`, and `traversal(node* root)` for inorder traversal.
• Given a linked list, remove all occurrences of nodes having a given value (return type `void`, requiring careful handling of double pointers).

The candidate could run and debug code on CoderPad.

Technical Round 2 (Core Concepts): The interviewer discussed the candidate's current work. A Linux SSH login was provided, and the candidate had to work with code in `vim`. Questions involved:

• Discussion on dynamic memory allocation (`malloc`/`new`) and how `free` works. Asked to implement `free`.
• Tree traversal algorithms: implement inorder traversal with and without recursion.

The interviewer was interested in the thought process rather than perfect code.

Round 3 (Director Round): This round involved extensive discussion about the candidate's projects and deep technical conversations about their current role. Topics included Linux platform maintenance and how to find files with duplicate content in a given Linux directory (explained using MD5 hash and `unordered_map`). Questions were also asked about the internal implementation of STL's `unordered_map`.