Cisco Senior Software Engineer in Oranmore: conversational theory round, Number of Islands in Java, whiteboard design and IntelliJ debugging

Interview process was straightforward. Three rounds in total:

First round was a basic HR screening call, just a fit check, very casual. She asked about my background, interests, why I was interested and then explained the role and expectations.

Next was a technical interview with the hiring manager via Webex. This was mostly conversational. We covered theory questions on OOP concepts and design patterns, a few questions on ACID and SQL theory, and one DSA question in Java which was a LeetCode question I'd done before, Number of Islands.

We discussed AI agents and how AI in general is changing our line of work, and I was asked some questions about my resume, mostly talking through my past projects, explaining decisions I made and why, talking through tradeoffs between different approaches, pretty much all answered with STAR format.

Next was the on-site interview, a mix of behavioural and basic concept questions, plus a whiteboard system design where I walked through a previous system I'd worked on (QPS, rate limiting, circuit breaker, etc.).

There was a debugging round where I was given a small project in IntelliJ and asked to identify the source of some errors. Overall, the process felt clear and well-structured, with a good balance of theory and practical thinking.