Arista Networks Software Engineer Interview Experience — OA Plus a Virtual Round on Threads and Linked Lists

Online Assessment

MCQ: basic knowledge of C++, linked lists, heaps and trees.

Coding Question 1: Server Processing Time

You are given numTasks tasks, each with a processTime[i], and numServer servers.

1. Each server gets a contiguous block of tasks
2. Each server gets at least m tasks
3. A server's execution time is the sum of the m largest task times among the tasks assigned to it
4. A server executes its tasks sequentially

Find the maximum possible total processing time across all servers.

Coding Question 2: Minimum Operations to Make Array Palindrome

Given an array, each operation lets you merge two adjacent elements (replace them with their sum). Find the minimum number of operations needed to turn the array into a palindrome.

Round 1 (Virtual Interview)

Basic concept Q&A:

1. Discussion of my multithreaded project experience
2. Thread vs process
3. Concurrency vs parallelism
4. How multicore processors are used in modern multithreaded environments

Coding Question 1: Swap Nibbles

Given a hexadecimal number, swap every even-position nibble with its adjacent odd-position nibble.

Coding Question 2: Find Pair with Given Sum in Sorted Doubly Linked List

In a sorted doubly linked list, find all pairs of nodes whose sum equals a given target.

1. Follow-up: how do you handle duplicates in the list, and how do you deduplicate the pairs?