Arista Networks

Typical interview loop

How Arista Networks usually runs it for applied AI and LLM engineer roles.

1. 1

   Online assessment (campus)

   Focus: CS basics and coding

   For campus and new-grad hiring, a one-hour online test mixes core CS multiple choice with two coding problems.

2. 2

   Coding screen

   Focus: Basic coding fluency

   A short screening task, typically string or data handling, before the main technical rounds.

3. 3

   Live coding rounds

   Focus: Working code, data structures

   Hour-long CoderPad sessions on medium data-structure problems where interviewers expect code that actually runs, not pseudocode.

4. 4

   C/C++ fundamentals

   Focus: Low-level C/C++ depth

   A technical round on low-level C and C++ behaviour such as memory layout, pointers, class hierarchies and file I/O.

5. 5

   System design

   Focus: Concurrency, OS, design

   An open-ended design of a concurrent service, followed by OS and C questions.

6. 6

   In-person interviews

   Focus: Final team assessment

   Arista states that hiring depends on a successful interview process that includes in-person interviews.

Topics to prepare for Arista Networks

The topics its loop weighs most, each with what interviewers check and what to study.

• Python for ML interviewsCoding
• Calling LLM APIs in Python: async, streaming, retriesCoding
• Self-attention from scratchTransformers
• Retrieval for RAG: chunking, hybrid search, rerankingRAG
• Evals and error analysisEvals
• The decoder-only transformer (GPT forward pass)Transformers
• Decoding: greedy, beam, temperature, top-k/top-pInference
• Embeddings and vector searchRAG

How it weights your plan

Selecting Arista Networks when you build a plan multiplies each topic’s priority score: