Degree : MS CS, SUNY UB
Position : SDE1 (Still not sure L59/60)
Location : Redmond, WA
Prior work ex : just about 1yr,

How I got the interview : Reached out in response to a hiring post on LinkedIn( look up "hiring xyz(position/location/company)" in search and filter by "content", that's how I found)

Interview Process

1. Phone Screen Tech Round(1 hr.) : Was sent a project folder by the interviewer and asked to complete 2 functionalities, it was pretty unorthodox for standard phone screen rounds, so less chance of this getting repeated for whoever's reading. The solution was based on hashmap and DFS approach. Got informed about on-site selection in few hours after the call.

2. On-site : 5 rounds
   Round 1 : Was asked about DS concepts like CAP theorem and stuff, then went to coding, which involved a designing a board game, was explained the rules, questions like snake and ladder and tic-tac-toe should help develop understanding for such questions.
   Round 2 : This was a lunch interview, basically spent an hour with a interviewer going through my prior work ex and college projects.
   Round 3 : Was asked about my project at prior company, then got asked a standard leetcode question on string manipulation, solved using hashmap to maintain count of characters.
   Round 4 : System design interview. Question was similar to API rate limiter question on the net, few variations, did not reach the desired solution, but key is to stick to terms and concepts that you are clear about, as every step leads to trade-off questions and follow ups, so speaking out a concept that you read about, but not entirely sure how it works, can be a bad mistake, as you'd be stuck on the followups.
   Round 5 : Got asked an open-ended design question where I was told to use the data structure I see fit. I used a modification of Trie data structure to come to the solution, it was actually not the solution the interviewer had in mind, but I stuck to it and explained how it'll resolve different aspects of the system.

   Note : You may have been annoyed that I did not mention the exact questions, it's not because of some so called NDA, I read it and it dosnt mention anything about interview questions(for all the NDA posts out there), rather because my questions were twisted from those at leetcode, that It'll not make sense to just tag it to it's closest question at leetcode.

   Preperation Material :

   1. Solved close to 250 leetcode questions, mostly easy and medium. barely 15 hard ones, that too referred to solutions for help in most of them.
   2. Approached around top 80-100 Microsoft questions filtered by last 6 months.
   3. BIGGEST HELP : educLative.io(leetcode dosnt let me write the correct spelling), took the monthly subscription, it's expensive but so worth it, will be posting my referral link below, please find it in case interested, grok. the coding interview course and system design course were big help in bridging my understanding and approaching codes with a better idea in mind. The different categories listed in *** the coding interview really help you categorize the code at hand into one of those, which gives you a great idea of what the solution could be, the data structures that'll work, and the worst case time nd space complexity such a question could have. So I would highly recommend this site.
      4, Dont keep solving questions till the last min, use the last day to just go through the questions you have solved, and the techniques that you picked up during your preperation.
   4. Dont panic if you get a question you havnt solved(for me it was every question in my process, I hadnt solved any of them before), just go step-by-step, and do not code until you have expressed your idea with the interviewer and heard his feedback, keep questioning yourself time to time as to the problems you may encounter in the next phase of the problem, if you choose to go with xyz approach in this phase, discuss potential trade-offs with the interviewer if you see them.

Best of luck with the preperation!!

Edit : Took 1 week to get the response.