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About this interview
A technical interview on Networking Fundamentals, pitched at the medium level. A voice AI interviewer leads the conversation, adapts its questions to your answers, keeps you on topic, and afterward gives you honest, specific feedback on where you were strong and where to improve. Expect roughly 30 minutes.
What you'll be assessed on
Explain the full request lifecycle from DNS resolution through TCP handshake to HTTP response
Describe IP addressing, subnetting, routing, NAT/SNAT, and VLAN concepts
Compare load-balancing algorithms and architectures (L4 vs L7, round-robin, least-connections)
Reason about Kubernetes networking: pod-to-pod, service discovery, kube-proxy, and DNS in cluster
Identify common network failure modes and appropriate diagnostic commands
Topics covered
Request lifecycleDNSTCP/IPIP addressing and NATIP addressing and subnettingVLANs and routingLayer 2 fundamentalsLoad balancingTLS and HTTPSKubernetes networkingNetwork diagnosticsSSH and tunnelingCDN and anycastRouting protocols
A few sample questions
Just examples to set expectations - the real interview has many more and adapts to your responses.
“Can you walk me through what happens in the network from the moment a user types a URL like https://example.com into their browser and presses enter, all the way until they see the page? Start from DNS and go through to the HTTP response.
“What is ARP and when is it used? What is an ARP cache, and what could go wrong if an ARP entry is stale?
“What is a Kubernetes NetworkPolicy, and how does it change the default behavior of pod-to-pod communication? Give me an example of a policy you might apply in a multi-tenant or PCI-compliant cluster.