My Next Hop Blog
Insights for engineers who want to interview better.
Practical, honest writing on interview preparation, communication under pressure, and what separates strong candidates from great ones.
SRE Interview Questions: What a Strong Incident Postmortem Answer Actually Sounds Like
The incident is already resolved before the interview question even starts — which is exactly what makes it hard. Blameless framing, root cause versus contributing factors, and why vague action items are the single most common way candidates lose points on this question.
What Meta's Coding Round Actually Tests for Network and Infrastructure Roles
Grinding generic LeetCode is not enough preparation for Meta's technical loop if you're targeting a network or infrastructure-adjacent role — the coding round blends classic DS&A with network-specific scripting, and the systems and Linux depth expected underneath it is easy to underestimate.
Microsoft Behavioral Interviews: Why Your STAR Stories Need to Change for an Azure Infrastructure Role
Most STAR prep treats 'Microsoft' as one evaluation standard. Growth mindset is the real throughline across every team — but what actually counts as evidence of it looks different for an Azure infrastructure-focused round than for a more general, cross-functional one.
The 10 Hardest Network Engineer Interview Questions (and What Separates a Strong Answer)
Not the hardest because they're obscure — the hardest because a correct-sounding answer and a genuinely strong one look almost identical until an interviewer pushes. Ten reasoning-heavy scenarios spanning BGP, firewalls, cloud, OSPF, and live troubleshooting, with what actually separates a pass from a strong pass on each.
Senior Network Engineer Interviews: What 'Exceeds the Bar' Actually Sounds Like
The gap between a mid-level and a senior network engineering answer at Amazon, Google, Meta, or Microsoft isn't more facts — it's scope, ambiguity handling, and trade-off depth. What actually changes across the level boundary, and how the real onsite loop structure tests for it.
Mastering BGP Route Reflection: How to Explain It in an Interview
Route reflection is the BGP topic candidates most often name-drop and least often can actually explain — the split-horizon rule it bends, what ORIGINATOR_ID and CLUSTER_LIST really prevent, the client and non-client reflection rules, and why redundant reflectors don't create routing loops.
GCP Networking Interview Questions: VPC and Load Balancing Scenarios
GCP networking interviews reward candidates who understand what's structurally different about Google's model, not just its product names. The global-VPC architecture, Shared VPC for multi-team orgs, Private Service Connect versus VPC peering, and the proxy-only subnet requirement that quietly breaks new load balancer deployments.
Firewall Interview Questions: Packet-Flow Reasoning, Not Definitions
Firewall interviews have moved past 'what is a stateful firewall' and into tracing exactly how a packet moves through a real security stack. The six-stage packet flow, why stateful inspection breaks under asymmetric routing, Proxy-ARP, rule shadowing, and split-brain HA — grounded in the platform consolidation driving renewed interest in this depth in 2026.
Why 'I Feel Ready' Is Not a Readiness Signal
Most candidates gauge readiness by a feeling — how much they've covered, how confident they felt reading their own notes back. Here is what measurable readiness actually looks like: independent scoring dimensions, a diagnosis instead of a grade, delivery metrics translated into coaching, and a readiness score broken into the parts that actually drive it.
AWS vs Azure: The Multi-Cloud Networking Trade-offs Interviewers Actually Test
Transit Gateway vs Virtual WAN, Direct Connect vs ExpressRoute Global Reach, and the segmentation gap most candidates miss — how to reason about AWS and Azure networking from the same underlying primitives instead of memorizing two separate consoles.
Topology Reasoning: Why Live Diagram Questions Are Replacing Whiteboard Trivia
A growing number of network and cloud interviews now hand candidates an unfamiliar topology and ask them to trace a path or diagnose a failure live. Here is what that actually tests, the failure modes that trip candidates up, and how to build the skill.
The Switching Questions Every Network Engineer Interview Still Asks — VLANs, STP, and EtherChannel
Routing dominates most interview prep, but VLANs, Spanning Tree, and EtherChannel still show up constantly. Here is the mechanism behind each, the gotchas interviewers build in deliberately, and how switching evolved into VXLAN/EVPN at datacenter scale.
AI Infrastructure Security Engineer Interviews: The Real Incidents Companies Are Now Asking About
GPU container escapes, a real 2022 PyPI supply-chain attack on PyTorch, and a fast-moving export-control fight over model weights — AI Infrastructure Security is now a distinct interview track, and interviewers are citing specific 2024-2025 incidents, not hypotheticals.
Post-Quantum Cryptography Is Now a Core Network Security Interview Topic
NIST finalized ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA in 2024, Meta published its own five-level PQC migration framework in April 2026, and hybrid key exchange is already showing up in TLS and VPN interviews. Here is the mechanism, the migration model, and how to talk about both under questioning.
BGP Route Hijacking Is Back on the Interview Table — RPKI, ROV, and ASPA for Network Security Engineers
The White House's 2024 internet-routing-security roadmap made federal RPKI adoption a national priority, global ROA coverage has climbed well past where it stood a few years ago, and ASPA is closing the route-leak gap that origin validation alone cannot. Here is what security-focused network interviews are asking in 2026.
SRv6 Is Now a Core Interview Topic — What Microsoft's Fairwater Deployment Means for Your Prep
Microsoft deployed SRv6 uSID across one of the world's largest AI training clusters and presented the architecture at NANOG96. SONiC 202505 ships it natively. Here is what interviewers are now testing and how to answer with depth.
The Networking Behind AI Inference at Scale — What Engineers Targeting Anthropic, Google, and Meta Need to Know
Prefill-decode disaggregation is now the default serving architecture at every major AI lab. The network connecting these pools — RoCEv2 fabric, KV cache transfer, L3 Clos over L2 — is becoming a core interview topic for senior infrastructure engineers.
AIOps Is Now a Core Interview Topic — Here Is What Network Engineers Need to Know
Cisco's AI-Native Networking Platform is live, Gartner projects 60% of network ops will be AI-handled by 2028, and interviewers are already testing you on it. Here is what they actually ask and how to answer well.
GPU Cluster Networking: The Most In-Demand Skill Network Engineers Are Not Preparing For
InfiniBand, RoCEv2, RDMA, and lossless fabric design are driving some of the steepest compensation premiums in infrastructure engineering. Here is what the interview questions look like and how to get ready.
eBPF Is Eating Networking — What Cloudflare, Meta, and Google Are Testing You On
eBPF has moved from kernel curiosity to core networking infrastructure at the world's largest tech companies. Here is what shows up in 2026 interviews and how to talk about it with confidence.
How to Ace Network Engineer Interviews in 2026
A practical guide to preparing for network engineer interviews, from protocol depth to delivery under pressure.
Why Good Engineers Still Fail Interviews in Nigeria
A realistic look at why many capable Nigerian engineers underperform in interviews and what preparation is actually missing.
Cloud Network Engineer Interview Questions and How to Answer Them
The cloud network engineer interview topics that show up most often and how to answer them with more depth and confidence.
How to Prepare for FAANG and Top Tech Interviews as an African Engineer
A grounded guide for African engineers preparing for high-bar global interviews without the usual access or preparation advantages.
Most Job Seekers Are Not Lazy — They Are Underprepared for Modern Interviews
Why many candidates are not failing because they are unserious, but because the modern interview demands skills most people were never trained to practise.
The BGP Interview Questions That Actually Get Asked (and How to Answer Them)
A practical breakdown of the BGP questions that appear most in network and cloud engineering interviews, with guidance on what a strong answer looks like at each level.
How to Use STAR Stories to Pass Amazon, Google, and Meta Behavioral Interviews
A practical guide to structuring behavioral interview answers for the companies that take behavioral questions most seriously — and what makes a strong story at each.
What a 90-Day Network Engineer Interview Sprint Actually Looks Like
A realistic week-by-week breakdown of how engineers preparing for senior network or cloud engineering roles should structure 90 days of interview preparation.