Netapp Interviews

I underwent my first-round interview for a Software Engineer role at Netapp on December 1st, 2025. Although it was scheduled for 45 minutes, our discussion extended to about 1 hour and 15 minutes, which I found to be a very healthy and engaging exchange. The interviewer was quite supportive, offering hints that helped me navigate towards solutions when I needed them. We began with an introduction and a chat about my current professional work. Following that, I tackled two coding problems, which were direct LeetCode questions. We also delved into several fundamental cloud concepts, such as what Kubernetes is, the CAP theorem, the distinctions between SQL and NoSQL databases, and the crucial considerations when architecting a highly scalable system. With 2 years of experience and Python as my primary technology, I am now eagerly awaiting further updates on the next steps in the interview process.

I had my first interview round at Netapp. The interview began with a long discussion covering Docker and Kubernetes concepts, which took a significant portion of the time. Following this technical discussion, I was presented with a coding problem: to find all prime numbers up to a given integer n. I spent about 15 minutes working on this. After the coding challenge, I was given a design-based DSA problem. The task was to design a chess game from scratch, including defining the necessary classes. I also had to implement key methods such as nextPossibleMoves() to identify valid moves and makenextmove() to execute them, ensuring that the game's state and all moves were properly saved within the board class to manage game flow effectively.

I recently had an interview experience for an SRE role at NetApp. I have 4.3 years of experience in SRE/DevOps and am currently working as an SRE at XYZ. The interview process started after a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, and a first technical round was scheduled.

However, the initial Round 1 (60 mins, Tech) was a no-show from the panel, and HR failed to inform me, despite my confirmation just hours before. This was quite frustrating. The round was eventually rescheduled for about a week later. During this rescheduled technical round, I was asked a variety of questions covering both coding snippets and core SRE/DevOps concepts:

• I had to explain the meaning and predict the output of various bash and python code snippets.
• A question on how StatefulSets differ from Deployments in Kubernetes.
• An explanation of namespaces in Kubernetes and their significance.
• Questions about Taints and Tolerations in Kubernetes.
• How to ensure that different replicas/pods for a deployment run on different nodes within a Kubernetes cluster.
• What steps to take if a Terraform state file gets accidentally deleted.
• Explanation of Nginx rate limiting.
• A comparison between helm install and helm upgrade --install.
• An explanation of how Helm works generally.
• Questions relating to Nginx and Ingress controllers.
• Concepts around CDN, rate limiting, DDOS, and DNS flow.
• How certificates work within a Kubernetes environment.

I felt I answered most of these questions fairly well, and the round seemed to go decently.

Afterward, the HR person contacted me for an in-office interview round. I requested some time to provide my available slots, but since then, HR has completely ghosted me.

My key takeaways from this experience are:

• NetApp seems to have a really poor talent acquisition culture.
• It's a reminder never to waste my time or leaves on companies that don't respect a candidate's time.

I haven't faced such an issue before and would be interested to know if others have had similar experiences with NetApp.

Technical Round 1

This round began with a detailed discussion on REST API protocols. The interviewer asked me to explain why REST is considered stateless and its advantages over SOAP. We then delved into the implementation details of various protocols. Following this, I was asked to design a singleton class. I started with a naive implementation, and then the interviewer challenged me to design a thread-safe version for a multi-threaded environment. For the remaining time, we covered very basic questions on linked lists, such as finding the middle element and reversing a linked list.

Technical Round 2

This round started with a discussion about my current project and overall experience. The first coding question was Reverse Nodes in K-Group. I asked a couple of clarifying questions, then developed a solution, wrote the code, and tested it with various test cases. Afterward, I was tasked with designing a billing module for their system. The system specifications were: the application is hosted on AWS servers; users are allocated cloud storage based on their subscription, and if the limit is exceeded, extra storage should be automatically allocated, with users seeing details during billing. Logs must be generated every 15 minutes and updated into the DB, containing details of storage used by the user for the past 15 minutes. The billing module should read these logs, parse them based on user IDs, and send this data to AWS billing. I clarified a few more requirements and proposed a rough solution.

Technical Round 3

The interviewer wanted me to explain my current project in detail, including each module and its integration. I shared my screen and used Draw.io for the explanation, fielding many questions on our implementation choices and the security aspects of the application. The first coding question was to print the top view of a binary tree, which is similar to vertical order traversal on LeetCode but only requires printing the topmost nodes. Following this, I was asked to think of an algorithm to generate permutations of a string. Instead of writing code, I was given a string and asked to predict the output my algorithm would generate, which was quite an interesting twist! Later, we had a couple of basic follow-up questions on binary search trees.

Managerial Round

This final round was with the product manager. I felt that by this stage, they had already considered me for the role. The discussion focused on my experience with Agile methodology, and the manager explained how they operate within NetApp using Agile. He detailed the requirements they were looking for and mentioned they were designing a new product, though I don't clearly remember all the specific details.