Ciena Interview Experience (Off-Campus)

Ciena Corporation is an American telecommunications networking equipment and software services supplier based in Hanover, Maryland. The company has been described by The Baltimore Sun as the “world’s biggest player in optical connectivity.” The company reported revenues of $3.62 billion for 2021.

Well, I have applied for Ciena through Naukari.com for a Software Engineer profile and My resume was selected for further processes.
There were 4 Rounds for selection and each one was the elimination one.

Coding Round: I got an email from company officials about the coding round where there were 6 coding questions and the time for this round was 1 Hour.

• Each question was different in itself and questions level were medium and Hard.
• These 6 problems were from the below topics
  • Array variations (Medium level)
  • 2 Problems String (Medium level)
  • 1 Tree problem (Mix of medium and Hard)
  • 1 Graph Problem (Hard Level)
  • DP Problem (Hard Level)

I was able to solve 5 problems and due to the time limit was unable to attempt 6th one.

After 1 week of this round, I got an email for an offline interview at the Ciena Gurugram office. The Interviewers were helpful and they started asking questions from easy to medium and then advanced levels.

1st Technical round: Well, this round started with my Introduction, then he asked about my resume project and my internship experience. After that technical part started with pointers-related problems and then some advanced concepts of pointers. There were different scenarios given and I have to answer them accordingly.
Then 2 more coding questions were asked.

• Flipping of bits
• Check whether a given number is a palindrome or not.
  I solved both the problems and then I was called for the next round of Interviews.

2nd technical Round: Again Interviewer was very polite and it started with my introduction. Then he asked me for topics that I was comfortable with which could be either pointers or strings. As my first round was based on pointers so I went for string this time.
He started with normal questions like finding out a specific character frequency in a given string with pseudo code. Then he asked me some very good variations of it.
After that, he started with structure and class concepts and asked me to code for linked list creation and then some modifications for a doubly linked list and its real-life examples were also discussed.
After that, he asked about the below problems.

• What are my understanding of stack and queue and both real-world examples?
• Then he asked some tree-related questions over linear and Binary search along with their complexity.
• At last, he asked me about some networking and switching-related problems.
  That’s how it went well for me and I was called for the last HR Round.

HR Round: In my case HR was a senior member with 17+ years of experience.

• He started with his introduction and then asked for mine.
• Then he gave some different scenarios and asked about my point of view on the same.
• He then asked some career-related questions and why I want to join Ciena.
• Going further he asked me about a real-world problem related to packet switching for fiber optics and I have to optimize it.
• Then finally he asked me to ask any query related to Ciena and that’s how we ended this round.
  After 4 days of Interviews, I got my confirmation from Ciena.

Hope it will help other geeks with their Interview preparation. Happy Learning..!!