CISCO Interview Experience for Software Engineering Internship 2025

Last Updated : 25 Sep, 2025

Candidate Information:

I am a prefinal year student majoring in computer science and engineering branch .
I recently got a chance of interview at cisco just wanted to share the process with you all, hopefully this will help you all in your intern-cycles.

Overview of Interview Process:

Initial Screening

So the OA happened on approximately (20 - 30 Days) before the actual interview. It was basically an online Assessment and happened all over India in all the colleges together Consisted of 40 MCQS and 2 Coding questions. The MCQS had an equal mix of (Aptitude, Computer Networks and Operating System) ofcourse accuracy mattered the most, I was able to solve only 1 of the coding question (Mainly of Trie) and didn't had any time for the Second.

I got a little lucky and got selected for the next round the only reason I think I got selected was because my MCQS were mostly correct.

PPT

We had a preplacement talk where they revealed about this :

To eliminate any sort of conscious or unconscious bias and make the interview process fair to all we are asking you to send us your resume without any personal identifiers that need not be disclosed while assessing your skill. Some of the things we want you to remove from your resume are:

Name
Contact details
CGPA
Previous educational institutions and associated scores (CGPA/percentage)
References to any specific college-wise clubs, associations, or fests
Languages known

Round 1 (Technical Round):

This was the first Round it started directly by Interviewer asking me to describe my projects with no introduction as you were not allowed to disclose anything. My resume had 2 projects one of which was a blockchain based group project he was interested in the project and how you worked in team what difficulties and conflicts you faced. After this the conversation shifted to API's asked what is a RESTAPI ? what are other types of API then he asked what is difference between a POST and PUT method in HTTP . Some basic stuffs as well like how do you query ? how do you do you pass values in headers.
Then he asked me about web cache and conditional get and proxy servers etc. Asked me what data structure will you use to implement cache (i didnt knew the ans so i guessed Hashmap -> then queues ->the priority queues (here he said we can use it but tell about insertion complexity heapify algo and said to optimize the complexity by using some other Data structure)) I got no where beyond this and he helped by saying doubly linked list i got the concept from there and explained the approach.you can read it here:(https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/lru-cache-implementation-using-double-linked-lists/) Web Cache
He was still not satisfied and asked about it and asked me that check if that element is in it will take O(N).
I replied we can use a unordered set to check availability then we can search . He seemed satisfied and then we coded the Whole approach of DLL with set using LRU. This took most of the time.
Now we moved to OS and he asked quick questions on Mutex , Semaphores and Deadlock (which i knew) then he asked about process , program and thread , he asked a follow up question what if we had 10 threads of a process but only 8 are in execution what might be the reason ? (again i guessed all possibilities). He again went to CN and asked what are unicast, mulitcast, broadcast, subnetting and ARP.

Then he asked me what is linear regression ? it was all of a sudden cuz i didn't mention anything about it on my resume. but i still answered he the asked about vector DB , sentence transformers and cosine similarity (this was from my second project).

ROUND 2 (Managerial Round):

This was a simpler round and mostly theoretical he also wanted to know about again got interested in them and asked how you built it , how you worked as team (I recommend putting one group project in resume it helps) he wanted to know the SDLC of project then asked a follow up on how you tested the project and how you debug the errors.
Then he asked a few questions on types of file system ? what do you infer by logical file sytem and physical file system , types of OS and about how OS and network is connected i.e the NIC (network interface card) part.
Then we switched to CN he asked what are the type of network topologies, the OSI model and a few more but fairly basic questions (nothing tricky as such).

Round 3 (HR Round):

This was a very light and friendly round as they first asked me to finally give a proper introduction (You can actually say your name ,college etc.) in this round. The she asked me why do you want to join ?, followed by who all are the competitors of cisco ? , this was indeed a very chilled round they then asked location preference and we ended the interview by her saying you are good to go.

please try to keep some group project, OS and CN understanding is must don't only look for solving DSA problems but look for their working real networking concepts (like web caches). Additionally if possible have some hands on experience with deployment of projects.

Post-Interview Reflections:

The interviewers are quite help full they help you if you get struck and overall i really liked the process as the only thing that mattered in interviews were your skills and not your college or CGPA or anything else.
Clear crisp and transparent process.