NetApp interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the NetApp software engineering interview across 4 levels and 20 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

NetApp salary & ratings · All interview processes

MTS Intern (On-Campus)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~1-2 weeks (campus drive) · Recommended prep: 4-6 weeks · Cooldown: Next campus season

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (coding + language proficiency + aptitude)

    Assessment · ~2 hours · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: You are given an integer array. Move all zeroes to the end while keeping the relative order of non-zero elements, in-place in O(n). Follow-up in the graph question set: count connected components in an undirected graph given as an edge list.

  2. Round 1: Technical interview (projects + DSA on paper)

    Onsite · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Write binary search on paper and dry-run it on a small array, including the failure case where the target is absent. Then: how would you test this function?

  3. Round 2: HR round

    Behavioral · ~15-20 min

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  4. Round 3: Managerial round

    Behavioral · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Member of Technical Staff (MTS, 0-2 yrs)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~3-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months

  1. Round 0: Online assessment

    Assessment · ~90-120 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Given a sorted integer array and a target value, return the first and last index of the target in O(log n), or -1 -1 if absent.

  2. Round 1: Technical round 1: DSA + pointers

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design and implement an LRU cache with O(1) get and put. Then process a sequence of GET/PUT operations and print each GET result.

  3. Round 2: Technical round 2: OS and networking fundamentals

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Walk through what happens when a process calls read() on a file: mode switch, VFS, page cache hit vs miss, disk I/O and copy back to user space. Where can it block?

  4. Round 3: Managerial round

    Behavioral · ~45 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  5. Round 4: HR discussion

    Behavioral · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Member of Technical Staff II (2-5 yrs)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~3-5 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter screen

    Phone · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Coding screen

    Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: A volume tracks allocated block extents as [start, end) pairs, possibly overlapping. Merge them into the minimal sorted set of disjoint extents and report total allocated blocks.

  3. Round 2: Onsite: DSA + problem solving

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: From a continuous stream of block-read events, maintain the K most frequently read blocks at any moment. Discuss your structure, then adapt it when reads arrive from 8 threads.

  4. Round 3: Concurrency and OS internals

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Implement a thread-safe bounded blocking queue (producer-consumer) using a mutex and condition variables. Why must the wait be in a predicate loop?

  5. Round 4: Hiring manager: design discussion + behavioral

    Behavioral · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Senior Member of Technical Staff (5+ yrs)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~4-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter screen

    Phone · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical screen: concurrency

    Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: You have a readers-heavy shared cache. Design the locking: single mutex vs shared_mutex vs sharded locks vs RCU-style approaches — costs of each, and when each wins.

  3. Round 2: Onsite coding: DSA + C++ internals

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Sketch a reference-counted smart pointer: what state lives in the control block, which operations must be atomic, and why the pointed-to object is still not thread-safe to mutate.

  4. Round 3: System design (storage flavored)

    System_design · ~60-75 min · difficulty 5/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design an incremental snapshot and restore service for block volumes: copy-on-write vs redirect-on-write, metadata layout, restore path, and what happens if a node crashes mid-snapshot.

  5. Round 4: Storage and OS deep dive

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: A database on your storage array calls fsync after every commit. Trace exactly what must happen for that guarantee to hold through the page cache, file system journal, RAID layer and disk write cache.

  6. Round 5: Hiring manager + behavioral

    Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Other companies' interview processes

Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.