CISCO SRE Intern + FTE offer Interview Experience , How I got the offer.

6 min readSep 9, 2022

I am Dipto Chakrabarty a graduate student from VIT Vellore in the field of Computer Science with specialisation in Information Security. My main interests lie in the field of Devops, Cloud Computing and Backend Development. I had done previous internships in the field of Devops and had also contributed to Open Source. I had been selected the Site Reliability Intern and Full time Role by CISCO India. This is my interview experience.

General Overview about the Process

The selection process of cisco consists of 4 rounds

Initial coding and mcq round
Technical Interview round
Technical and Managerial Interview Round
HR round

The eligibility criteria for the process are the following

Minimum of 8 CGPA
No standing arrears
Pursuing a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science or Information Science

Coding Round

The first round consisted of around 20 mcq problems which were based on the concepts of networking, operating systems , general programming , aptitude like speed and time, number patterns , work time taken , general concepts of cloud computing like scalability and elasticity etc. There was no negative marking.

The coding question was a question based on arrays concept and the choice of language was left to the user. I coded in python and got all my test cases passed , in the end I had about 11 minutes remaining when I submitted.

Technical Interview Round

I was selected for the interview rounds for the role of Site Reliability Engineer along with about 70 other candidates from all roles. This year CISCO decided to hold a group discussion round for the software engineering roles however our rounds were still interview based.

My interview was taken by a panel of two developers initially my interview started by basic questions

What is the difference between sql and nosql databases and when should you use what
Difference between hard and soft links
Paging in Operating Systems and Virtual Memory
How do you search a word in a file using Linux commands and how can you replace a word in a file using linux commands
Questions on forks in operating systems , how many child processes will be created
Difference between transport and data link layer in the tcp ip model
Which layer does segmentation and fragmentation takes place and difference between them
Explain about Normalization in databases describing its different types
General overview on how HTTP protocol works on the internet

After this the questions were based more on my experiences and work that I had done on internships and projects, open source

What are the different ways to add SSL to a web server application
What is sonarqube and what is its functionality
Describe how an attacker might attack a website even though SSL has been added to it
Describe the CI/CD pipeline architecture you used in you internship
How is jenkins used alongside kubernetes
Difference between Docker and Virtual Machine
About my experience using terraform and AWS
What are the dependencies of using ansible in a system and why is it considered better than the other configuration management tools.
What type of projects have you developed using flask , kubernetes and MySQL.
Partitioning in Databases.

The questions discussed above were mostly based on the experience ,projects and skills I had mentioned in my resume. Towards the end I was asked a few questions related to logical thinking . Some of the questions in the whole interview I was unable to answer but overall it went okay. The interview went for approximately 1 hour. At the end they asked whether I had any questions and generally talked about my certifications. I asked them a couple of questions related to the work that had to be done, tech stack , their experience at CISCO and then the interview was concluded.

I was then shortlisted to the next round.

Technical and Managerial Interview Round

This round was again held by a panel of two CISCO developers . Compared to the previous interview this was much shorter. The technical questions in this round were again based on my experience and work done.

Difference between terraform plan and apply
why are kubernetes pods said to be immutable
Use case of sonarqube
Experience using CI/CD tools like Jenkins
Have you used GitHub actions before
Status codes for example what does 404 mean , 503 mean etc.

The managerial questions asked to be were somewhat situation based and some were general questions

Suppose you have a conflict with your team mate, how will you resolve it?
What is you preferred tech stack that you like to work with
Explain a time when you had to learn something new
What were some of the mistakes you had made during your previous internship

After this I was given the chance to inquire and ask any questions that I had . I asked a couple of questions but this time related to the team functioning within the organisation , project management and growth opportunities. This interview concluded in about 20 to 30 minutes.

I was then shortlisted for the final HR round.

HR Round

This round was the shortest ,only for 2 to 3 minutes where I was asked about my location preference , they queried whether I had any other offers which I did not at that particular moment and that was all.

I was selected for SRE intern and Full time offer that very day. Just to note, most of the questions asked to me revolved around Operating System, general programming, networking and OOPs. The domain specific questions related to devops , kubernetes , terraform, AWS , ansible ,jenkins and flask was due to the experience I had based on what I had put in my resume and described during the interview.

Final Tips

Based on what I did you may find these tips useful for you as well , however you are encouraged to follow you own path

I solved around 200+ coding problems from leetcode and interview bit both which was sufficient for me
I had started revising OOPs, DBMS , Operating System before the CISCO exams which helped
Before the interviews I brushed up my concepts which were written on my resume for example docker, ansible , kubernetes.
Make sure you are aware of what you have put in your resume.
Keep some answers ready for example introduction about yourself , or what is your weakness or what mistakes you had done on your previous internships. I had these answers ready based on my previous experiences.
If you are not clear about an answer just say so , for example the sonarqube question I only had idea an about sonarqube and did not know its configuration which I said so and they moved to a different question. For some of the puzzle problems I was unable to come up with a solution but I gave the idea and direction in which I was thinking.
Try to give examples to explain your answer , for the normalisation question for example I gave an example of a student table and how I would normalise it.
CISCO has a ton of roles that a fresher can join and the candidate is required to provide a preferential order in what role they desire. Make sure to research each role so that during the interview you can explain why you are interested in this particular role and why they should select you. In my case since my experience was focused more towards devops and cloud computing the Site Reliability Engineer Role was perfect for me.

All the best for your placements and interviews.