The interview process was a little interesting. The first round was an online assessment conducted on the HackerRank platform. Two days later, I received a call from a Cisco recruiter to schedule a series of interviews. He was very helpful and explained the entire process.

It was interesting because an "blind interview" drive was underway. In this drive, the interviewers for the first two technical rounds did not have access to my resume, meaning I was judged solely on my skills and job requirements. Even when joining the virtual interviews, I had to use a candidate code (e.g., candidate_10) instead of my name.

I completed both technical rounds, and both went very well. About an hour later, the recruiter called to inform me that I had cleared the technical rounds and wanted to schedule a managerial round for the same day. I had a great conversation with the hiring manager. A week later, the recruiter called again to let me know my profile had been shortlisted.

Round 1: Online Assessment

This assessment took place on HackerRank. It consisted of 4 coding questions and 6 MCQs to be solved within 75 minutes. Of the 4 coding questions, 2 were related to linked lists, and the other 2 were related to arrays and general programming.

Round 2: Virtual Interview

• How a program works from the operating system's point of view (how it starts in an operating system)
• Questions related to the ready queue, scheduling, and main memory
• Questions related to binary search with complexity
• Data structures and algorithms: Focused areas were linked lists, stacks, and arrays
• A medium-complexity puzzle

Round 3: Virtual Interview

• Operating system concepts in depth: Focused on static and dynamic loading of a program.
• This job position was for a Python Developer role, so there were questions on Python, OOPs, Python references, decorators, etc.
• Program to remove duplicates from a list in Python in-place while conserving element order.

Round 4: Manager Round (Virtual)

• Questions about my projects
• Question on how I would approach the upliftment of a project
• Some behavioral questions.