I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Cisco (Galway) in Jun 2026
Interview
1st round - 15 minutes with a team lead/manager
2nd round - 1 hour technical discussion (Oral system design + resume discussion)
3rd round - Coding round in office
Did not make it through due to inexperience in C++. But the panel made me feel comfortable and everything was professional enough.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Types of pointers in C++, Unique pointer, Shared pointer, Heap, Stack
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Cisco (Bengaluru)
Interview
I applied for the position and successfully attended the screening and coding round. The interview mainly focused on C programming and networking concepts, including IP subnetting, bitwise operations, and implementing logic to verify if an IP belongs to a subnet. There were also questions on TCP/UDP and debugging concepts. After the interview, I followed up with the recruiter, who shared that based on the feedback, my profile will not proceed further.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Cisco (Tel Aviv-Yafo) in Dec 2025
Interview
After applying on site I was reached by a recruiter which asked a few role specific questions and scheduled an technical interview with the recruiting manager.
First interview:
Introduction, tell me about yourself etc and the main question was "Talk about a system that you worked on end to end".
Second Interview:
System design interview. Role specific system, nothing special just a bit tricky. (not design youtube or twitter or anything like that).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Talk about a system that you worked on end to end.
Senior Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Cisco with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 57% positive. To compare, the company-average is 68% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Senior Software Engineer roles take an average of 13 days to get hired, when considering 69 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Cisco overall takes an average of 27 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Cisco as a Senior Software Engineer according to 69 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 28%
One on one interview: 24%
Skills test: 15%
Background check: 10%
Group panel interview: 10%
Presentation: 4%
Personality test: 3%
Other: 2%
Drug test: 2%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
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