Arista's software-engineering loop is unusually low-level and language-native: everything is coded in C or C++ on a barebones editor (CoderPad, SSH into a plain terminal), with interviewers probing pointer semantics, memory layout, and OS internals as hard as they probe algorithms. Freshers in India start with a HackerRank OA (CS-fundamentals MCQs plus 3 medium-hard coding problems), then face 2 to 3 technical rounds and often a director round. Laterals report 3 rounds of DSA plus LLD plus a director/HM round, and non-SWE tracks (application support, sales-engineering leadership) run 5 to 6 interviews with a mandatory director at the end. The bar skews rigorous and picky: multiple candidates report solving every problem and still being rejected, and a previous rejection can freeze you out for years.
These 14 writeups cover software engineering, frontend engineering, networking software and other roles. 11 of them were posted under a forum handle, so we could not verify the authors’ identities.
1Online assessmentOnline assessmentHackerRank test with MCQs on C/C++ pointers, OOP and aptitude, plus a coding problem asking for the maximum sum of distinct elements in a subarray of size k.Covered: Aptitude, OOP, C/C++, Arrays & strings
2TechnicalTechnicalGoogle Meet interview covering pointer semantics, basic Unix pipes like ls | grep, a linked-list rearrangement into a zigzag pattern, and OS and computer-organization fundamentals.Covered: C/C++, Linked lists, Operating systems
3TechnicalTechnicalDeep dive into the candidate's scene-text-recognition project followed by C++ questions on object slicing, how virtual functions are implemented at the compiler level, and an LLD problem.Covered: OOP, Low-level design, Past projects
1Online assessmentOnline assessmentHackerRank test with a 15-minute MCQ section on aptitude, OS, OOP and C fundamentals plus three coding problems covering sorting and iteration, backtracking on strings and tree traversal. Roughly 15 of 120 candidates advanced.Covered: Aptitude, Operating systems, OOP, C/C++, Data structures & algorithms
2TechnicalTechnicalLive coding on a shared IDE covering C functions, pointers, deleting leaf nodes from a binary tree recursively and heap operations combined with square-root computations.Covered: C/C++, Trees, Data structures & algorithms
3Technical + HMHiring managerIn-person session with a senior engineer walking through the candidate's resume and projects, then implementing an ordered map and a hash map with a discussion of hashing and collision resolution.Covered: Low-level design, Past projects, DBMS
1Online assessmentOnline assessment60-minute HackerRank round with 15 MCQs on core CS subjects, one easy and one medium coding problem including a hammer-usage optimisation over wooden planks.Covered: Networking, DBMS, Operating systems, Data structures & algorithms
2DSATechnical45-minute Google Meet live coding: convert a binary linked list to its decimal value, then design a stack that supports minimum retrieval in O(1).Covered: Linked lists, Data structures & algorithms
3System designSystem design50-minute session designing a URL shortener with delete-after-expiry and multiprocessor support, ranging into OS concepts and low-level C questions.Covered: System design, Operating systems, C/C++
1Online codingOnline assessment90-minute HackerRank test with three problems in C/C++: shortest path with obstacles via BFS, message sorting and concatenation by type and port, and interval merging with proximity conditions. Solving at least two cleared the round.Covered: Graphs, Arrays & strings, C/C++
2TechnicalTechnicalOne-hour discussion covering x++ vs ++x, recursion vs iteration trade-offs, C memory layout, processes vs threads and a Zomato-style restaurant-search design using tries.Covered: C/C++, Operating systems, Trees, System design
3TechnicalTechnicalPointer dereferencing, dynamic allocation, critical sections, mutex vs semaphore, a log-query problem solved with a trie and a bitonic-array search with complexity tuning.Covered: C/C++, Operating systems, Trees, Data structures & algorithms
4Technical + HRHiring managerRationale for picking BST over heap, implementing a hash map, virtual memory concepts and behavioural questions on motivation to join.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Operating systems, Behavioral
1Online assessmentOnline assessmentHackerRank MCQs on CS fundamentals, Linux and C/C++ plus three coding problems focused on priority queues. Only about 10% of the batch advanced.Covered: Operating systems, C/C++, Data structures & algorithms
2TechnicalTechnicalResume discussion followed by C++ debugging, process states and zombies, and DSA questions on BST path sums and articulation points.Covered: Operating systems, C/C++, Trees, Graphs
3Technical + designTechnicalMissing-number problem via hash maps, then designing an ID allocation system for router connections using a linked list. The round stretched with candidate follow-up questions.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, System design, Networking
1TechnicalTechnicalIn-person 40-minute round with pointer and memory-allocation questions (malloc, calloc, free), an in-place linked-list rearrangement (1 to 6 to 2 to 5 to 3 to 4) and a bit-manipulation check for powers of two using n & (n - 1).Covered: C/C++, Linked lists, Bit manipulation
2TechnicalTechnicalOne-hour CodePair round on structs and pointers, achieving OOP in plain C, threads and memory management, and designing an Employee Directory without a database using a trie.Covered: C/C++, OOP, Operating systems, Low-level design
1DSATechnicalOne-hour session with two LeetCode-style problems: a circular game winner solved in O(n) time and O(1) space, and a maximum-sum subarray with distinct elements.Covered: Arrays & strings, Data structures & algorithms
2HLD + LLDLow-level designOne-hour firewall-design problem, progressing from a naive hashmap through IP-range matching with a trie and finally combining source and destination tries into a unified match structure.Covered: Low-level design, System design, Networking
3DirectorHiring managerIn-person director round: explain a personal project's architecture, then design a Coursera-like platform covering enterprise licensing, race conditions, locking, CAP, schema and API design, plus behavioural questions.Covered: System design, Past projects, Behavioral, DBMS
1DSATechnicalOne-hour CoderPad round completing partial C/C++ functions: minimum value in a BST variant with parent pointers, inorder traversal via a successor function and node removal from a linked list using double pointers.Covered: Trees, Linked lists, C/C++
2OS + HMHiring managerRemote SSH session analysing recursive code causing a stack overflow, program memory layout, malloc/free internals and implementing inorder traversal both recursively and iteratively.Covered: Operating systems, C/C++, Trees
3DirectorHiring managerDiscussion of Linux and filesystem experience, deduplicating files with MD5 hashing, and unordered_map internals including hash-bucket expansion.Covered: Operating systems, Past projects, Data structures & algorithms
1TechnicalTechnicalOne round covering C/C++ pointer basics, reversing a segment of a linked list with multiple test cases, whether infinite loops overflow the stack, and extracting IP-address octets from a uint32 using bit isolation.Covered: C/C++, Linked lists, Bit manipulation, Operating systems
1DSATechnicalVirtual DSA round with two LeetCode-style problems (target sum equal to K, merge two sorted linked lists) followed by a Go concurrency question: two goroutines playing ping-pong, holding the ball for random seconds, print the holder after a timeout.Covered: Arrays & strings, Linked lists, Concurrency
2HLDSystem designOnsite: draw the candidate's current project architecture, then design a parking system with trade-off discussion on scalability, consistency, API and DB design.Covered: System design, API design, DBMS, Scalability
3Techno-managerialHiring managerOnsite: implement a Go token-bucket rate limiter using only goroutines (no mutexes), then deep-dive from k8s service IP through kube-proxy into iptables internals.Covered: Concurrency, Networking, Low-level design
1System design + networking + debuggingSystem designTwo-hour session with a US SONiC engineer: VRFs, ASIC and TCAM, ACLs, MAC rewriting, packet traversal, building a multi-router topology with Linux network namespaces, and a live C debugging task uncovering an uninitialised variable, a returned local-stack pointer and misuse of sizeof.Covered: Networking, Debugging, C/C++
Frontend Engineer
Outcome not shared
Experienced. 1 round. Shared by Sid Siva (Medium) on blog, 2026-02-01
1Discussion + codingTechnicalDiscussion-style round on handling large API fetches and caching (local storage vs session vs server-side), pagination and virtualisation for 100k+ rows, the JS event loop, polyfills, closures and a computation on maximum download time under size thresholds.Covered: API design, Scalability, Concurrency
1Technical phone screenPhone screenAbout 80 minutes on data structures: inorder successor in a BST, a find-missing-positive binary search variant and a compare-and-contrast of time and space complexity across implementations.Covered: Trees, Data structures & algorithms
2Hiring managerHiring managerOne-hour session on prior projects and problem approach, then coding merge k sorted arrays and deduplicating an array (in JavaScript, per candidate report).Covered: Past projects, Data structures & algorithms
3Two senior engineersTechnicalAbout 70 minutes on React fundamentals and internals, hooks (implement useState), portfolio walk-through and diagnosing performance issues on a laggy website.Covered: Past projects, Debugging
1Rounds 1-2: Virtual technicalTechnicalTwo virtual rounds screening application/production-support fundamentals before the onsite loop begins.Covered: Domain knowledge, Debugging
2Rounds 3-5: Onsite technicalPanelThree in-person rounds. The last panellist told the candidate this was the final round.Covered: Domain knowledge, Past projects
3DirectorHiring managerA separately scheduled director round added after the supposed final round, focus (behavioural vs technical) not disclosed by the candidate.Covered: Behavioral, Past projects
What Arista Networks is hiring for now
225 open roles in our index. Advertised pay floors run $119k to $152k (median $133k, from 68 postings that state pay).
What is the interview process like at Arista Networks?
Arista's software-engineering loop is unusually low-level and language-native: everything is coded in C or C++ on a barebones editor (CoderPad, SSH into a plain terminal), with interviewers probing pointer semantics, memory layout, and OS internals as hard as they probe algorithms. Freshers in India start with a HackerRank OA (CS-fundamentals MCQs plus 3 medium-hard coding problems), then face 2 to 3 technical rounds and often a director round. Laterals report 3 rounds of DSA plus LLD plus a director/HM round, and non-SWE tracks (application support, sales-engineering leadership) run 5 to 6 interviews with a mandatory director at the end. The bar skews rigorous and picky: multiple candidates report solving every problem and still being rejected, and a previous rejection can freeze you out for years.
What topics does Arista Networks test in interviews?
Commonly reported topics include Data structures & algorithms, Linked lists, Trees, Bit manipulation, Low-level design, System design.
These guides summarize public, first-hand interview experiences shared by candidates. They describe the shape of each loop and the topics that came up, not a leaked question bank, and every experience links back to its original source. Processes change often. Treat this as directional prep, not a script.
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