Master the first interview
The deep technical pages make you right; this section makes you hireable in the room. Round by round — recruiter, hiring manager, the first technical screen, live scenarios, behavioral, and the curveballs — with answers written in your voice and tailored to the wireless-PHY-to-networking pivot.
1. The Recruiter / HR Screen
This screen is about making Graham confident you are relevant, realistic on compensation, easy to represent, and worth putting in front of the hiring manager.
2. The Hiring-Manager Interview (CV deep-dive)
A resume-driven hiring-manager prep pack that makes Mohamed's embedded PHY background read as an adjacent move into AMD's low-latency NIC/datapath work.
3. The First Technical Screen
A mock first technical screen for the former Solarflare/AMD networking team: show calm low-level C, packet-path instincts, and a credible PHY/embedded-to-NIC pivot.
4. Live coding: the SPSC ring buffer
The exercise at the heart of the first interview, narrated end to end: clarify, design, the power-of-two mask, head/tail ownership, acquire/release (and what breaks on Arm), cache-line padding, batching, testing, and benchmarking.
5. Live Scenarios & Mini-Designs
Open-ended first-screen prompts for AMD networking: not discrete C puzzles, but small system designs, debugging walkthroughs, latency tradeoffs, and explanations that reveal how Mohamed thinks at the hardware/software boundary.
6. Earn the Vocabulary — the follow-ups that catch a career-changer
The mechanism answers behind every NIC term you'll drop — learn these cold so 'doorbell', 'Onload', 'kernel bypass' and 'descriptor ownership' are earned, not borrowed.
7. Behavioral / STAR Stories
This round tests whether your CV stories actually prove senior debugging, ownership, and cross-team judgement. Win it by anchoring each answer to a different real project, making it concrete and measured, then honestly bridging to NIC/datapath work without inventing driver experience you don't have.
8. Curveballs & Meta-Scenarios
The pressure moments in the first interview are less about perfect recall and more about staying senior, honest, structured, and relevant under uncertainty. The recurring win here is the same: anchor in the real engineering fundamentals you have, name the Linux/Ethernet gap without flinching, and never bluff a detail you don't know.
9. Linux NIC Driver Lifecycle
First-screen senior questions for explaining the Linux PCI Ethernet driver lifecycle honestly: studied and traced, not shipped, while bridging to embedded C, firmware, registers, interrupts, and HW/SW debug experience.
10. Logistics, Format & Follow-up
The non-technical operating manual for Mohamed's first AMD interview stages: format, pacing, scheduling, live-coding setup, follow-up, and how to look organized enough for the top of the band.