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Senior Systems Engineer Interview Questions

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2,761 senior systems engineer interview questions shared by candidates

This was my first interview with an engineering team within IS&T at Apple and felt like the 3 interviewers were overly harsh. Don't be surprised if they say "write a shell script on the board", or ask subnetting questions (e.g. IP address to binary) or get heavy into networking questions for a Systems Admin job. I was surprised, and didn't really find a lot of the questions fair for the job classification. I was not impressed that I was left alone and forgotten.
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Senior Systems Engineer

Interviewed at Apple

4.1★
Apr 30, 2013

This was my first interview with an engineering team within IS&T at Apple and felt like the 3 interviewers were overly harsh. Don't be surprised if they say "write a shell script on the board", or ask subnetting questions (e.g. IP address to binary) or get heavy into networking questions for a Systems Admin job. I was surprised, and didn't really find a lot of the questions fair for the job classification. I was not impressed that I was left alone and forgotten.

Apple technical people are sharp and they understand their stuff or the market products very well. One of the interviewers actually asked why my company's (at that time) product is designed in that way. The question is pretty open-ended and I had given it a hard thought and explained in the technical way. At last, I asked back what did he (the interviewer) think and he said that he wasn't sure as well but it seemed my answer technically makes sense.
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Senior Hardware Systems Engineer

Interviewed at Apple

4.1★
Jan 14, 2015

Apple technical people are sharp and they understand their stuff or the market products very well. One of the interviewers actually asked why my company's (at that time) product is designed in that way. The question is pretty open-ended and I had given it a hard thought and explained in the technical way. At last, I asked back what did he (the interviewer) think and he said that he wasn't sure as well but it seemed my answer technically makes sense.

None of the questions were particularly out of the ordinary for systems administration work, except for one. And quite honestly, if I spoiled it here, it would ruin its usefulness. If you interview for this team, you'll run into it, and how you answer it is just as important as the technical knowledge you show while answering it.
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Senior Systems Engineer

Interviewed at Apple

4.1★
Feb 10, 2011

None of the questions were particularly out of the ordinary for systems administration work, except for one. And quite honestly, if I spoiled it here, it would ruin its usefulness. If you interview for this team, you'll run into it, and how you answer it is just as important as the technical knowledge you show while answering it.

1. Difference between NAND and NOR flash memory? 2. Inter-process communication methodologies 3. Tell about semaphore and mutex 4. Challenges faced in previous job 5. Calculation of binary to octal and hexadecimal numbers 6. Clone functionality in linux
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Senior Systems Engineer

Interviewed at Wipro

3.6★
Oct 10, 2022

1. Difference between NAND and NOR flash memory? 2. Inter-process communication methodologies 3. Tell about semaphore and mutex 4. Challenges faced in previous job 5. Calculation of binary to octal and hexadecimal numbers 6. Clone functionality in linux

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