Bloomberg - Pune (India) | SSE | Interview R1 | Techincal Screening | 24th Dec 2025
Salesforce | MTS | Selected
LinkedIn SWE Infra Interview experience
Google L4 Interview Experience & Timeline
TCS Digital Interview Experience (TCS NQT Priority Hiring)
Cisco | SDE2 | 2022 || Offer
Summary
I successfully interviewed for an SDE2 position at Cisco after five rounds, securing an offer. The interview process covered technical, coding, and behavioral aspects, with a focus on distributed systems and Java.
Full Experience
I applied for an SDE2 position at Cisco through a referral from a friend. My background includes 5 years of experience from India and Abu Dhabi, with a Master's in Software Engineering from ASU. I have a good amount of experience in distributed services, Kafka, Zookeeper, and feel confident with leadership principle questions, as well as SQL and NoSQL databases.
I received an interview request via an automated bot system, which I found to be quite inefficient.
Cisco Round 1: Technical Screen
This round primarily focused on my distributed systems background. I was asked questions related to Kafka, Zookeeper, microservices, and general distributed system concepts. There was also a detailed discussion on NoSQL vs SQL databases, specifically regarding sharding and distribution. Multithreading in Java, particularly in the context of distributed technologies, was also covered.For the coding part, I was given a problem to clone a linked list with a random pointer. The interviewer was very friendly, and I was able to solve it with some assistance, which allowed me to proceed to the next round.
Cisco Round 2: Coding Challenge
This round was a dedicated coding challenge, featuring the standard LeetCode Three Sum problem. It was recommended to check all variations of this problem.Cisco Round 3: Generic Java & Behavioral
This round involved generic Java-related questions covering topics like memory leakage, inheritance, and abstraction. Additionally, I was asked a few leadership and team-based questions.Cisco Round 4: Partial Technical
The interviewer was from the networking team and initially intended to ask networking-related questions. While I didn't have extensive knowledge in networking, I was fortunate as he didn't delve deeply into it. He was appreciative and motivating, acknowledging my new graduate status and quick learning ability.Cisco Round 5: Hiring Manager Final Round
In the final round with the Hiring Manager, I faced a few generic questions, including how I would approach debugging microservices. We also discussed my work experience in detail.Ultimately, I received an offer from Cisco for the SDE2 role.
Interview Questions (5)
A linked list of length n is given such that each node contains an additional random pointer, which could point to any node in the list, or null.
// For example:
// 1(4)->2(null)->3(2)->4(null)
/*
// Definition for a Node.
class Node {
int val;
Node next;
Node random;
public Node(int val) {
this.val = val;
this.next = null;
this.random = null;
}
}
Standard LeetCode Three Sum question. It is recommended to check all variations of this problem.
Discussion on the differences between NoSQL and SQL databases, including concepts like sharding and distribution.
Generic questions about memory leakage in Java.
Questions on how I would approach debugging microservices.