The hiring process at Cisco takes an average of 46 days when considering 2 user submitted interviews across all job titles. Candidates applying for CSM had the quickest hiring process (on average 1 day), whereas Intern Field Sales roles had the slowest hiring process (on average 90 days).
I was interviewed majorly on my previous internship experience - what my contribution to it was, and each of my projects in detail. (Make sure to know your projects in depth and able to answer any question based on it). We then delved into a basic DSA Question
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The interview steered in the direction of System Design. I had to design and develop an app that was meant to be a competitor to Instagram. I was given about 5 minutes to think it through and come up with a basic architecture. After I explained my architecture, I was asked a follow-up question about delay handling in case of distributed systems, and I wasn't able to answer it correctly as I had not dealt with such systems in the past.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Cisco (Bangalore Rural) in Mar 2025
Interview
It went smooth, but they were very reluctant about the language, they don't need programmers, they just need people who can just code. There were few DSA questions as well, but they were basics.
It was a one round interview. It was predominantly on data science and large language models, they gave me a repo of an agent framework, and asked me to find the code where reward is calculated.