Cisco Software Engineer Interview Questions

1.Give me an example of when you noticed someone on your team was struggling or disengaged. What did you do about it?

2.Walk me through a time you connected two different engineering teams to solve a problem that was blocking both of them. What was the outcome?

3.Tell me about a time you had to get two teams that didn't normally work together to collaborate on solving a technical problem. What was the problem and how did you make it happen?

4.Tell me about a time you had to make a technical decision that disappointed users in the short term but was better for them long term. How did you handle their reaction?

5.Describe a situation where you had to choose between hitting a release deadline and addressing a customer-reported issue. What did you decide and why?

6.Tell me about a time you proposed a technical approach that went against established practices at your company. How did you handle the pushback?

7.Write a function that takes network device configurations and validates they follow our zero-trust security policies. The function should flag any risky configurations.

8.Debug this Python function that processes network telemetry data. It works fine in testing but times out in production when handling Kafka streams with millions of events per hour.

9.You're maintaining a Webex service that processes video streams for millions of users. After a deployment, video quality starts degrading but only for users in certain geographic regions. How would you debug this?

10.You need to implement rate limiting for our REST APIs that serve both internal Cisco services and external developer partners. How would you design this to be fair but protect our infrastructure?

11.Our Meraki cloud dashboard needs to display real-time network health for 100,000+ managed devices. The current solution polls each device every 30 seconds but it's overwhelming our backend. Design a better approach.

12.Design a system to automatically detect and respond to security incidents across thousands of customer networks managed by our SecureX platform. Focus on the detection pipeline and escalation logic.

13.Design a monitoring system that can track real-time performance metrics for AppDynamics across 50,000 customer applications. Each app generates roughly 10,000 metrics per minute. How would you handle the data ingestion and alerting?

14.Webex needs to route video calls between users globally with sub-200ms latency. Design the routing logic that decides which media servers to use when a user in Tokyo calls someone in London.

15.Design a configuration management system for Meraki that can push network policy updates to 500,000 managed devices within 5 minutes. Some devices are behind firewalls and can only poll, others can accept push notifications.

16.SecureX needs to correlate security events from thousands of different vendor products across customer networks. Each vendor has different event formats and update frequencies. How would you design the ingestion and correlation pipeline?

17.Design a global DNS and load balancing system for Cisco's networking products that can handle 10 million queries per second while maintaining 99.99% uptime. The system needs to route traffic based on both geographic proximity and real-time service health.

18.Design the data pipeline for a new Cisco product that needs to process network telemetry from 1 million IoT devices in real-time, detect anomalies, and trigger automated responses within 100ms. Each device sends 50 data points every second.

19.Tell me about a time you had to influence a more senior engineer to change their approach on a project. How did you make your case?

20.Describe a situation where you identified a gap in your team's technical capabilities and took initiative to address it. What was your approach?

21.Describe a time you had to advocate for investing engineering time in something that wasn't a customer-facing feature. How did you build support for it?

22.Tell me about a time you noticed your team was making decisions that excluded or overlooked someone's input. What did you do?

23.Walk me through a time you had to push back on a product or design decision because of security concerns. How did you handle the tension between security and other priorities?

24.Tell me about a time you had to challenge a long-standing technical practice or tool choice on your team. How did you drive that change?

25.Estimate how many network configuration changes Meraki processes globally per day. Walk me through your reasoning and what factors you'd consider.

26.A major enterprise customer wants to migrate 10,000 network devices from on-premises management to Meraki cloud in 6 months, but they can only have 2-hour maintenance windows monthly. How would you estimate the migration timeline and identify the bottlenecks?

27.Our Webex usage spikes 300% during major global events like the Olympics opening ceremony. How would you estimate the additional infrastructure cost and plan capacity?

28.A customer reports that their AppDynamics dashboard shows application performance degraded by 40% after they migrated to a new cloud provider, but their internal monitoring shows everything is normal. How would you investigate this discrepancy?

29.SecureX correlates security events across thousands of different vendor products. If correlation accuracy drops from 95% to 87% over two weeks with no code changes, how would you investigate and prioritize the root cause analysis?

30.Cisco's networking hardware generates approximately 50TB of telemetry data daily across our customer base. If we wanted to implement real-time anomaly detection with 99.9% accuracy, estimate the computational and storage costs. What would be your approach?