My friend, who also happens to be my senior colleague from a previous company, dropped my resume, which was about six months old. I received a call from HR for interview scheduling while I was holidaying.

Step 1: It started with one round of telephonic screening, which was more of a technical screening plus one or two behavioral questions. The technical questions mostly focused on resume details, such as how to resolve a loop in a network, how to configure IP addresses for multiple computers automatically, and which mode of transmission is used by DHCP.

Step 2: I was confirmed for an onsite interview by the hiring manager the next day, and he scheduled the onsite interview for just a couple of days later.

Onsite Interview: Five rounds, including a lunch interview.

• Three completely technical one-on-one rounds with software engineers from the team, mostly focusing on networking-related questions, programming questions (design + coding approach), and in-depth OSPF protocol testing with the CCIE from the team. This round didn't go all that well.
• One lunch interview with the same CCIE software engineer who conducted the previous round. Over lunch, he asked questions about virtualization architecture and how my earlier projects related to networking, plus choice of platforms.
• The fifth and final round, which was 1.2 hours long, was with the hiring manager. He asked all sorts of resume-related and behavioral questions, including how I would strike a work-life balance, how I face challenges (with examples), and discussions about previously filed bugs.

Step 3: I received confirmation by phone after two days and had to go through some salary negotiation, as the base pay was not in line with my expectations. However, I was told by the hiring manager that I was already earning above market standards and he could match it with a sign-in bonus.

I accepted the offer as Cisco was my dream job. As long as I got to work on good technologies and in areas of my interest, I was okay with it. Also, I was mesmerized by the Cisco campus in Bangalore.

Given a network topology (which was quite complex and drawn on a whiteboard), walk through the steps of how OSPF will communicate over the different networks. IP addresses were marked, and the interviewer kept changing the topology throughout at intervals.