Cisco Software Development Engineer SDE interview questions

Behavioral Questions Can you describe a challenging project you worked on and how you approached it? How do you prioritize tasks when working under tight deadlines? Have you ever faced conflict in a team? How did you handle it? Tell us about a time when you failed. What did you learn from it? How do you ensure effective communication in a team project? Technical Questions Data Structures and Algorithms Explain the difference between a stack and a queue. Provide a real-world example of each. How would you detect a cycle in a graph? Can you explain the time complexity of quicksort? Write a program to find the k-th largest element in an array. What is the difference between depth-first search (DFS) and breadth-first search (BFS)? Database Explain normalization and its different forms. How would you optimize a SQL query? What are the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases? Write a query to find the second-highest salary in a table. What are indexes in databases, and how do they improve performance? Problem-Solving Questions How would you design a system to handle real-time notifications for millions of users? How can you improve the performance of a web application? Given a large dataset, how would you find duplicates efficiently? Design a load balancer system for a high-traffic website. How would you debug a memory leak in a running application?