Cisco Software Engineer Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

1 hour coding test involving tree data structure

Q1. Design a rate limiter
Ans. 
Rate limiter design to control the rate of requests to a system
• Implement a token bucket algorithm to limit the number of requests per unit of time

• Use a sliding window algorithm to track and limit the number of requests within a specific time frame

• Consider using a distributed rate limiter for scalability and reliability
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Timing: Late Night around 8 PM
Environment: At home, online on Hackerrank platform

Round consist of 2 DSA questions and 15 MCQs.

Q1. 
Rat in a Maze Problem Statement
You need to determine all possible paths for a rat starting at position (0, 0) in a square maze to reach its destination at (N-1, N-1). The maze is represented as an N*N ma...read more
Ans. 
Find all possible paths for a rat in a maze from source to destination.
• Use backtracking to explore all possible paths in the maze.

• Keep track of visited cells to avoid revisiting them.

• Recursively try moving in all directions (up, down, left, right) until reaching the destination.

• Return a list of strings representing valid paths sorted in alphabetical order.
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Timing: 10 AM Morning
Environment: Cisco Webex & Coderpad
The interviewer was a helpful and cool person

Q1. 
Intersection of Linked List Problem
You are provided with two singly linked lists containing integers, where both lists converge at some node belonging to a third linked list.
Your task is to determine t...read more
Ans. 
Find the node where two linked lists merge, return -1 if no merging occurs.
• Traverse both lists to find the lengths and the last nodes

• Align the starting points of the lists by adjusting the pointers

• Traverse both lists simultaneously until a common node is found
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Q2. 
Interleaving Two Strings Problem Statement
You are given three strings 'A', 'B', and 'C'. Determine if 'C' is formed by interleaving 'A' and 'B'.
String 'C' is an interleaving of 'A' and 'B' if the lengt...read more
Ans. 
The problem involves determining if a string is formed by interleaving two other strings while maintaining their order.
• Check if the length of string C is equal to the sum of the lengths of strings A and B.

• Iterate through string C and check if all characters of A and B exist in C in the correct order.

• If at any point a character in C does not match the corresponding character in A or B, return False.

• Return True if all ch...read more
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