Cisco's system-design rounds lean on networking and device-scale realities: telemetry from millions of network devices, safe configuration rollout and rollback across a fleet, and hot-path evaluators that must fit constrained hardware.
In 2026 expect prompts on high-cardinality ingestion and time-series storage, how you avoid bricking a fleet on a bad config, and which data structures fit tight memory and latency budgets on a device. Interviewers reward candidates who reason about worst-case latency and memory footprint, not just average-case big-O.
About Cisco
Cisco India (Bengaluru) is the company's largest global engineering campus outside the US with ~15,000 employees. It covers core routing and switching software, SD-WAN, WebEx (Cisco Collaboration), security, and cloud networking.
Resume screen or online assessment
Technical coding round on DSA
System-design round on a device-scale or networking service
Hiring-manager round, then offer
Round 1 (60 min)
coding round on data structures and algorithms.
Round 2 (60 min)
system-design round on telemetry, config management, or hot-path evaluation.
Round 3 (45-60 min)
design deep-dive on constrained-hardware trade-offs plus behavioral.
Sourced from 2+ candidate post-mortems. Hit Practice to answer any one with AI voice feedback.