Cisco Interview Process - New grad Software Engineer

Recently appeared for the Cisco G6 SDE interview. The overall experience was good, with questions covering projects, DSA, and core CS fundamentals.

1. Project Discussion

The interview started with an introduction and discussion about my projects. I was asked about my Agentic AI development project, its architecture, workflow, technologies used, and my role in building it. There were also questions around how AI agents work, tool calling, memory, multi-agent systems, and how the system handles errors and hallucinations.

2. DSA / Coding Questions

I was asked two coding questions:

• IP Address Validation: Write a program to check whether a given IPv4 address is valid or not. The discussion involved handling edge cases, checking the number of octets, and validating the range of each octet (0–255).

• Zigzag Traversal of Binary Tree: Perform zigzag level order traversal of a binary tree using BFS and a queue, alternating the traversal direction at each level.

The focus was on the approach, edge cases, and time and space complexity.

3. Computer Networks

Networking was an important part of the discussion. Questions covered:

• OSI model and TCP/IP model.

• TCP vs UDP and the TCP three-way handshake.

• DNS resolution and what happens when we enter a URL in a browser.

• HTTP vs HTTPS and SSL/TLS.

• IPv4 vs IPv6, subnetting, and MAC vs IP addresses.

• ARP, DHCP, NAT, routers, and switches.

• Flow control and congestion control.

Overall Experience

The interview was a mix of practical problem-solving and core technical knowledge. I would recommend focusing on DSA, Computer Networks, and having a clear understanding of your projects. The interviewer was interested in the reasoning behind the answers rather than just theoretical definitions.

Overall, a good learning experience
I was not advanced to the second round as i could not solve 1 Dsa question completely