Nutanix interview process (2026)
Round-by-round breakdown of the Nutanix software engineering interview across 4 levels and 20 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.
MTS Intern (on/off-campus, Bengaluru / Pune)
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~1-2 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-6 weeks · Cooldown: Next campus season
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Round 0: Online Coding Round (HackerRank)
Assessment · ~75 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank
Sample question: Longest Increasing Path in a Matrix — Given an n x m grid of integers, return the length of the longest strictly increasing path. From each cell you may move up, down, left or right (no diagonals). Input: n m, then the grid. Output: the path length.
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Round 1: Debugging Round (OS concurrency bugs)
Assessment · ~45-75 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Debugging exercise — A program spawns K worker threads, each reading its own input file and appending records to one shared output file; an acknowledgement must be printed in strict file order (file 1 before file 2, ...). The given code sometimes interleaves writes and prints acks out of order. Identify the missing synchronization (mutex around the shared append, condition variable enforcing turn order) and fix it with minimal changes.
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Round 2: Technical Interview 1 (DSA deep dive)
Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Sum-string — A string like 12243660 is a sum-string because 12+24=36 and 24+36=60. Given a digit string, determine whether it can be split so every substring (from the third onward) is the sum of the two before it. Discuss your recursion and its complexity.
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Round 3: Technical Interview 2 (light system design + CS fundamentals)
Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Design Pastebin for an intern-level discussion — define the paste-create/read API signatures, pick a database and justify it, add a cache layer for hot pastes, then implement an LRU cache for that layer.
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Round 4: HR / Hiring Manager Chat
Behavioral · ~30 minutes · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
MTS-1 / MTS-2 — Member of Technical Staff (Bengaluru / Pune)
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months (community-reported)
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Round 0: Recruiter Screen
Phone · ~20 minutes
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Online Assessment / Coding Screen (HackerRank)
Assessment · ~60-90 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank
Sample question: Remove Duplicate Letters — Given a lowercase string, delete duplicate letters so every letter appears exactly once and the result is the smallest in lexicographical order among all possible answers. Input: the string. Output: the answer string (e.g. cbacdcbc -> acdb).
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Round 2: DSA Interview 1
Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Alien Dictionary — Given a list of words sorted according to an unknown alphabet, derive a valid ordering of the characters. Detect and report the case where the input is inconsistent (a cycle) or a word is followed by its own proper prefix.
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Round 3: DSA Interview 2 + CS Fundamentals (OS / networks)
Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Inverted level-order weighted sum — Given a binary tree of height h, multiply every node value by its inverted level (leaf level weight h, root weight 1... i.e. deepest level gets weight 1 reversed to the root) and return the total sum. Clarify the weighting scheme, then solve in one BFS pass.
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Round 4: Hiring Manager Round
Behavioral · ~30-45 minutes · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
MTS-3 (SDE-2 equivalent, Bengaluru / Pune)
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 2 months · Cooldown: ~6 months (community-reported)
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Round 0: Recruiter + Initial Technical Screen
Phone · ~30-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Live interview · HackerRank CodePair
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Round 1: DSA Round 1 (two LeetCode mediums)
Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Rotting Oranges — An n x m grid holds 0 (empty), 1 (fresh orange), 2 (rotten orange). Every minute, fresh oranges adjacent (4-directionally) to a rotten one rot. Return the minutes until no fresh orange remains, or -1 if impossible. Input: n m then the grid; output the answer.
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Round 2: DSA Round 2 (open-ended problem solving)
Onsite · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Live interview · HackerRank CodePair
Sample question: Buildings With an Ocean View — Buildings stand in a line, ocean to the right. A building has a view if every building to its right is strictly shorter. Given n heights, print the indices with a view in increasing order. Follow-up discussed live: heights arrive as a stream — maintain the answer online.
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Round 3: System Design (infra-flavoured HLD + LLD)
System_design · ~60 minutes · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Config propagation — An admin updates a configuration file that must reach all N servers (2<=N<=50). Design the update path: push vs pull, versioning so stale servers converge, handling a server that is down during the update, and how you verify cluster-wide consistency. Then sketch the classes for the agent running on each server.
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Round 4: Hiring Manager Round
Behavioral · ~30 minutes · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
MTS-4 / Senior MTS (Bengaluru / Pune)
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~3-5 weeks · Recommended prep: 2-3 months · Cooldown: ~6 months (community-reported)
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Round 0: Recruiter Screen
Phone · ~20-30 minutes
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Coding / DSA (senior bar)
Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: All Nodes Distance K in a Binary Tree — Given the root, a target node, and integer K, return the values of all nodes exactly K edges from the target. Walk through converting the tree to an undirected adjacency view (or parent pointers) and BFS from the target; analyze time and space.
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Round 2: System Design (distributed systems HLD)
System_design · ~60-75 minutes · difficulty 5/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Distributed job scheduler — Design a scheduler that runs millions of one-off and cron-style jobs across a fleet: job submission API, durable queue vs DB-backed state machine, worker leasing with heartbeats, exactly-once-ish execution on worker death, priorities and rate limits, and how the control plane survives a node loss.
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Round 3: OS / Systems Deep Dive
Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Concurrent writers with ordered acks — K threads each process their own input stream and append results to one shared log; acknowledgements must be emitted in submission order even though processing finishes out of order. Design the synchronization (mutex + condition variable on a next-to-ack sequence number, or a per-slot buffer), then discuss what changes if writers are processes on different machines.
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Round 4: Hiring Manager / Leadership
Behavioral · ~45 minutes · 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.