Cisco DevOps / SRE Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you had to coordinate between your DevOps team and another engineering group to solve an infrastructure problem that was blocking both teams.

2.Describe a time when you had to make an infrastructure decision that would impact customer experience, but you didn't have complete information about all the potential effects.

3.Describe a situation where you had to choose between a quick infrastructure fix that would minimize customer downtime versus a more thorough solution that would take longer to implement.

4.Tell me about a time when you noticed team morale or collaboration was suffering and you took action to address it.

5.Walk me through a time when you pushed for a major change to your team's deployment or monitoring practices that others initially resisted.

6.Give me an example of when you had to get multiple engineering teams to adopt a new DevOps tool or process that would benefit everyone but required effort from each team.

7.You're monitoring a Webex video call service that's seeing intermittent packet loss affecting call quality for enterprise customers. The issue only happens during peak hours and our network telemetry shows normal bandwidth utilization. How would you investigate this?

8.Our CI/CD pipeline for network automation scripts takes 45 minutes to run integration tests against virtual Cisco IOS devices. The team wants faster feedback. How would you optimize this?

9.Our Meraki cloud dashboard is experiencing high database load when customers with thousands of devices try to view their network topology. The current query scans the entire devices table. How would you optimize this?

10.Write a Python script that monitors network interface utilization on Cisco switches via SNMP and automatically triggers bandwidth upgrades when utilization exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes.

11.Design a container orchestration strategy for deploying SecureX microservices that need to handle sensitive security data while meeting zero-trust requirements across multiple AWS regions.

12.You need to implement a Kafka-based event streaming pipeline for AppDynamics that can handle 100K+ application performance events per second while maintaining exactly-once delivery guarantees. Walk me through your architecture.

13.Design a distributed configuration management system for our Cisco IOS devices that can push config changes to 500,000 network devices globally while ensuring rollback capability if a change breaks connectivity.

14.Our network automation platform needs to execute configuration changes across different Cisco device types (IOS, NX-OS, Meraki) while providing unified logging and audit trails for compliance. How would you design this?

15.Our Meraki cloud platform needs to scale real-time device monitoring from 1 million to 10 million network devices. Each device sends telemetry every 30 seconds. How would you architect this?

16.Design the deployment pipeline for Webex's video processing microservices that handles 50 million meeting minutes per day. Zero-downtime deployments are critical since customers can't have their meetings interrupted.

17.Build a monitoring and alerting system for SecureX that can correlate security events across firewalls, endpoints, and network devices while processing 1TB of security telemetry daily.

18.Design an auto-scaling infrastructure for AppDynamics that can handle traffic spikes during major application outages when monitoring requests increase 100x while maintaining sub-200ms API response times.

19.Tell me about a time when you had to influence a security team to adopt a new DevOps practice that they felt might compromise their security posture.

20.Give me an example of when you identified that your team's practices or tools were inadvertently making it harder for other engineering teams to do their jobs, and how you addressed it.

21.Describe a situation where you had to lead your team through a major incident affecting customer-facing services, but the root cause was unclear and you had multiple stakeholders demanding immediate answers.

22.Tell me about a time when you championed a technology or architectural change that would benefit the broader engineering organization, but required convincing skeptical senior engineers who preferred the existing approach.

23.Describe a time when you had to make a controversial decision about infrastructure priorities that disappointed some stakeholders, but you believed was right for the long-term health of the platform.

24.Tell me about a time when you had to lead a cross-functional effort involving both hardware and software teams to solve an infrastructure problem that neither domain could solve independently.

25.Estimate how many Webex video calls Cisco's infrastructure needs to support simultaneously during a typical business day. Walk me through your assumptions and calculation approach.

26.A major enterprise customer reports that their Meraki dashboard is timing out when they try to view network health for their 5,000 devices. This started happening last week with no recent deployments. How would you investigate this performance degradation?

27.You need to estimate the storage requirements for SecureX to retain security event logs for 90 days across all customer deployments. Each event averages 500 bytes and we process about 50 billion events per day. What's your storage strategy?

28.Our network automation team reports that pushing configuration changes to Cisco IOS devices is taking 3x longer than expected when deploying to more than 100 devices simultaneously. The changes themselves are simple VLAN updates. What could be causing this bottleneck and how would you optimize it?

29.Cisco is launching a new IoT security service that needs to analyze network traffic patterns from 10 million connected devices in real-time to detect anomalies. Each device generates about 1KB of metadata every 10 seconds. Design the data pipeline architecture for this.

30.AppDynamics customers are complaining that our application monitoring dashboard becomes unusable during major outages when they need it most. Usage spikes 50x but response times go from 200ms to 30+ seconds. The current architecture uses a single database cluster. How would you redesign this to maintain performance during crisis scenarios?