Cadence Design Systems Interview Questions
& Process

The first step is a chat with HR, pretty standard, asking about daily life and career path, plus a little bit in English to check your fluency. They also send a programming project to do and submit for the next stage. The second stage is directly with the team, and they ask questions about the project you did. The HR person said in the first stage that there would only be questions about the code done and optimizations. However, the interviewers decided to ask to modify another piece of code that had nothing to do with the project done and it basically turned into a Live Coding interview (it wasn't just about optimizing the code, you had to know how to solve the proposed problem). Besides that, there was no time to think, the interviewer (one of the managers participating) pressured you to say what you were thinking every second (maybe to avoid cheating). But what was supposed to be an easy interview turned into a test of how to solve problems under pressure and under the judgment of at least 5 people watching your screen live. Basically, they didn't test your skills, ignored all optimization questions, and only tested if you could solve problems under pressure and intense scrutiny. My advice to you, if you want to avoid cheating, have an in-person interview and let the person solve any problem in a room, nobody is forced to try to think and write code while being pressured every second to say something. Also, the interview feedback was sent automatically by the recruitment platform in a generic way, without any word from HR.

I went through interviews for two different teams. The first team was heavily focused on Java and object-oriented programming (OOP) in Java, and they wanted me to design systems using OOP principles. The second team covered all the computer science fundamentals like OOP, computer networking (CN), operating systems (OS), and also asked medium-level data structures and algorithms (DSA) questions. Their focus was on C, C++, and Python, not Java.

I sent in my application online and a recruiter reached out pretty quickly for an initial chat. We went over my background, what I know technically, and if I'd be a good fit. The recruiter was good at communicating and clearly laid out what would happen next. They set up several interviews with the team super fast, all within a week. The recruiter kept me in the loop with updates and was really helpful when I had questions, making the whole thing feel pretty smooth and organized.

It was a virtual managerial interview. The interviewer went over my resume, asking about my previous research, projects, and experience related to the job. We mainly talked about my C++ work, performance improvements, and how I approach software design. It felt more like a chat to see if I'd be a good fit, how I communicate, and if I understood the job.