Cloud Infrastructure Engineer Interview Experience at Cisco – 2025

Recruiter screen on background and current responsibilities, with particular attention to how much of the candidate's experience is cloud-native versus traditional networking, given Cisco's hybrid focus.

Opens with OSPF routing behavior - specifically how areas are structured hierarchically and how a router determines the shortest path when multiple equal-cost paths exist. The round then deliberately bridges into cloud-native networking, asking candidates to explain how kube-proxy handles Service-to-Pod routing internally, comparing the older iptables mode against the newer IPVS mode, and which one scales better as the number of Services in a cluster grows. This bridge from classical to cloud-native networking is consistent with what real Cisco interview reports describe as testing whether candidates have genuine networking fundamentals underneath their Kubernetes vocabulary, not just memorized cloud-native terms.

A Terraform-based infrastructure provisioning scenario: given a requirement to deploy identical infrastructure across three AWS regions, candidates are asked to design the module structure. A strong answer argues for a single reusable module parameterized by region rather than three near-duplicate configuration files. The CI/CD portion asks how to sequence a multi-region deployment pipeline so that a failed deployment in one region does not proceed to the next - a fail-fast approach with per-region approval gates for anything beyond a low-risk configuration change is the expected shape of the answer.

Discussion of team fit, experience working across time zones given Cisco's globally distributed engineering teams, and a specific question about a past project requiring a handoff of ongoing work to a teammate in a different time zone with minimal overlap.