Viasat Interview Questions
& Process

To prepare, focus on DSA, and get a good grasp of computer networks and operating systems. Master the fundamentals. The interview process had 3 rounds. The first two rounds were technical and lasted about an hour each. The third round was with the manager.

I applied for a Product Designer position in Ireland, and after they looked at my resume, portfolio, and salary expectations beforehand, I had an initial interview. However, I was told I was too senior for the role and my salary requirements were too high, even though they were standard for Ireland. It felt like a waste of time since they already had all the information.

The process was for a contract role. Initially, I had two calls, followed by a final panel interview. Despite receiving positive feedback and even connecting with the team on LinkedIn, the hiring manager didn't show up, and the recruiting team seemed disorganized. They scheduled a 2-hour panel but only informed me it would be an hour. Of the panelists, only three out of six attended. They took turns talking and expressed frustration with the recruiters regarding the scheduling issues. I was informed I was their top candidate, but then experienced a week and a half of being ghosted. Unexpectedly, I received a call expressing concern about my commute (1 hour 20 min). Even after I confirmed I would relocate, I was ghosted for another week. Upon reaching out again, the recruiters provided conflicting information. Suddenly, they mentioned ViaSat was being difficult. In total, this process wasted a month of my time. ViaSat has interesting projects, but their recruitment process needs improvement.

First, they looked at my resume and asked a bunch of questions about the projects on there. They really dug into the tech I used, like the MERN stack and Flutter, and any tricky bits with stuff like payment gateways. Because I'd been a Team Lead, they asked about how I handled leading teams, managing tasks, and any leadership headaches I ran into, wanting to see how I worked with others and kept projects on track. They also wanted to know about the numbers I put on my resume, like how much user retention or app performance I improved. Then, we got into coding problems. They gave me an array problem with duplicates to solve efficiently, and I talked about different ways to do it, like using sorting and hash maps. We also covered graph traversals (DFS and BFS), and they asked me to code them and explain when to use each. Since they saw I liked the two-pointer method, they gave me a problem for that, and I had to explain how I'd set it up and deal with edge cases. Finally, there were networking questions. They asked about TCP vs. UDP and when to use each, and how TCP makes sure data gets there reliably. They wanted me to explain the OSI model layers and how they connect, especially transport and network. Plus, questions about IP addresses (IPv4 vs IPv6), subnetting, DNS, and how HTTP works, including the request-response cycle and status codes.