Cadence Design Systems Software Engineer interview experience

The plan was a mix of two technical rounds and one behavioral round, and the whole thing leaned into a blended format where they asked both theory and coding-style questions.

The way it played out felt like a competency-focused evaluation rather than a pure coding test. In the later conversations, I sat through discussions with technical staff, HR, and directors back-to-back. Even when technical questions came up, they were mostly basic grounding—things like simple logic and theorem-level reasoning—while the dominant theme was how I talked through projects and explained how I handled