Arista Software Engineer Interview Experience — One-and-Done After a C/C++ Screen

Arista·Software Engineer·Oct 2025
Technical ScreenRejectedeasy

Arista — one round and done, Vancouver, network systems team.

A lot of new openings got posted toward the end of the year — maybe they'd just opened up a new team?

The one round was a VO, purely technical. After a five-minute self-introduction they went straight into problems. They used CoderPad, and most of the questions had already shown up on the forum.

Questions and discussion

const char* c = "12345";

They asked about the difference between print("%s", c), print("%d", c), print("%c", c), print("s%", *c), print("c%", *(c+1)), and so on, plus debugging it with gdb.

A variant of LC268 — nums is sorted, it's possible that no number is missing at all, and the starting number can be any number. They wanted O(log n) time.

Mixed in were some memory-related questions — the difference between malloc and new, and what the heap, stack, data, and text segments are each responsible for.

There were also some low-level memory management questions that I genuinely didn't know, so the interviewer just skipped them.

Interview impressions

The interviewer was very nice, very patient, and kept giving hints. But since I'd only just started grinding interview problems and hadn't touched C/C++ in a long time, I was pretty nervous and wasn't well enough prepared.

Based on other people's experience on the forum, it sounds like there are usually around three questions, getting harder as you go. From the recruiter call onward, the whole process was professional and efficient.

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Arista
Role
Software Engineer
Rounds
Technical Screen
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
easy
Interview date
Oct 2025
Questions from this interview
2 questions

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