Interview prep · Cisco jobs

Cisco Platform interview questions

69 interview questions for Platform roles at Cisco, written from Cisco’s 8 current postings on its own careers page. These are what the postings say to prepare for — not questions Cisco has asked.

Built 2026-10-12

Three of the questions

  1. Walk me through how you'd debug a packet drop issue on a Nexus switch where traffic matching an ACL rule is being forwarded incorrectly through the CPU packet path instead of being hardware-switched.
    Technical depth · from the posting: “Demonstrated experience with L2/L3/ACL/QOS Packet Forwarding and/or CPU packet path”
  2. You're on-call for the Nexus switch software and a customer reports intermittent packet loss only under high QoS queue pressure in production. Walk me through how you'd triage this and what root cause analysis you'd write afterward.
    Scenarios & troubleshooting · from the posting: “Troubleshoot sophisticated issues within the production environment, may serve customers through on-call rotations to identify end user problems, may lead postmortem and write root cause analysis.”
  3. Tell me about a time you identified and debugged a sophisticated issue in production that required root cause analysis. What was the issue, and how did you solve it?
    Behavioural · from the posting: “Troubleshoot sophisticated issues within the production environment, may serve customers through on-call rotations to identify end user problems, may lead postmortem and write root cause analysis.”
See 11 questions free How interview prep works

What the full prep holds

  • Common questions · 8
  • Your background · 3
  • Quick-fire technical · 29
  • Technical depth · 12
  • System design · 5
  • Scenarios & troubleshooting · 6
  • The company & the problem · 3
  • Behavioural · 3
  • Questions to ask them · 3

A free account shows the 8 common questions and the 3 above. Basic and Elite show every question with how to answer it; Elite also writes your own answers from your resume. See plans.

The Cisco postings it is written from