Hi Leetcode community, wanted to share my interview exeprience for Microsoft for L62 round. It has been kind of a seesaw experience from start to end.
About me
- 2019 graduate from an NIT (6 years 9 months experience)
- Currently working as an SSE at a PBC
Interview timeline
- Applied to a lot of openings on Microsoft's career page on their careers portal in December 2025.
- A few days later, got an interview invite from recruiter for R1 (DSA) and R2 (design). Both rounds were to be of 45 mins each with a 15 min gap between each round and were conducted on 9th January. This was for the XBox team in Noida.
Round 1
Was asked two questions.
-
Heaters (https://leetcode.com/problems/heaters/)
I initially thought that it's a graph based question and gave a graph + binary search approach. It's actually only a binary search based question. Took slightly more time than expected on this question but was able to give a satisfactory approach. As we were running out of time, we moved to the next question without running the code for test cases. -
Add two large numbers represented as strings without using any bigint library. Was able to code this in 15 minutes. Interviewer was also happy to extend the time by a few minutes.
Self evaluation : Lean hire
Round 2
Interviewer was an engineering leader at Microsoft. We had a quick discussion on my work ex and projects, followed by the problem statement.
You are required to design JIRA. How would you take care of conflicting changes to the same JIRA ID, let's say when two persons are simultaneously updating the JIRA description.
I initially gave a lock based approach. That we'd be taking a lock on the row to avoid conflicting updates. But he was more interested in how an error would be communicated to the second person if they updated the doc a few seconds after it was updated by someone else.
I then gave an approach of storing JIRA ID X session ID X last read timestamp in a table. The moment a GET call happens on a JIRA ID, store info for this session ID in this table. Another table can store the JIRA contents like ID, description, last modified. Then, when an update request is received, check the last read timestamp from table 1 and compare it with last modified on of table 2. If the former is < latter, then the doc was updated by someone else and an error message can be communicated.
Self evaluation : Strong hire
The interviewer seemed satisifed with the approach. On 12th January, I got a call that my R3 will be scheduled for the next day.
Round 3
Was asked Google Docs HLD. Gave the standard approach of websockets, OT / CRDT. Interviewer went into the depth of both OT and CRDT, which to use when, what kind of data structures should we use to store Word documents.
Self evaluation : Strong hire
The next day, I got a call that since my earlier DSA round was not a strong hire, I would have another DSA round and my performance in that round would decide if I move to the HM round.
Round 4
This round happended on 14th January and was of 1 hour. Interviewer was a super-chill guy and was based out of the Redmond office. I was asked to implement max-stack (without the pop-max) method. I gave both the linear and constant time and space solution and was able to code it in 30 mins. We dry ran for a few cases for the next 10 minutes and he seemed satisfied with the approach.
We spent the next 15 mins chatting about the team structure, work culture among other things.
Self evaluation : Strong hire
Got the call a few days later from the recruiter that feedback was positive and I'll be moving to the HM / AA round.
Round 5
This round happened on 22nd January and was with the director of XBox team based out of Redmond office. The interviewer had been working with Microsoft for close to 25 years.
Standard discussion on projects, work ex and behavioural questions were asked. I too asked the HM a lot of questions wrt how he has seen the company evolve over so many years. This round went on for close to 1 hour 40 minutes and we were almost chatting after a point.
Self evaluation : Strong hire
Barely 5 minutes after the round ended, I got a call from the recruiter asking for documents and got a verbal confirmation. But she said that they'll be giving L61 level and not L62, which I was aiming for. I felt L61 to be a downlevel but as I didn't have any competing offer at that point, I consented.
It's after this that things went south. I sent them all the docs requested the same day. On 27th January, I got an email that my offer has been put on hold as the candidate who was leaving has been retained. I was later informed that the offer stands cancelled.
I got very dejected at that point. I was also interviewing with PhonePe simultaneously and got an offer from them, but as I didn't have a counter offer of MS, I got lowballed there too.
The redemption
Fast forward a few weeks, I had put my papers at the current org after receiving PhonePe's offer. One night, after I received a rejection from LinkedIn, call it my desperation, I mailed my Microsoft HR asking if I can reapply to job postings on MS or will there be a cooldown period. Additionally, I also asked if she can consider my profile for some other roles.
A week later, I got an email from her that there is an HM in Hyderabad who's interested in my profile and since I had already cleared all the rounds, there will be only an HM round and I'll be in if I clear it. I thanked her profusely and asked her to schedule the interview.
This round happened on 16th March. It involved a deep dive on one of my projects and how would I extend it for a much larger scale. The round went well. Next day I got a call from HR that the HM is considering a further design round as it's a different team. I was exhausted from the constant interviewing but I consented. 30 minutes later, the HR called again saying that she again had a discussion with the HM and they felt that the design round will be repetitive and since I had already cleared the earlier rounds, they will roll out an offer for L62 role. :D
I was beyond ecstatic. The same day, I emailed my documents again and this time I had a counter offer for better leverage. The HR got back with numbers the next day and it was mostly within the top bracket of L62 compensation in India. I negotitated for slightly higher stocks and they agreed.
The offer letter was rolled out on 19th March. I accepted it the same day. BG verification was initiated on 24th March and is currently ongoing with joining somewhere around mid-April.
I was also fortunate to receive 2 more offers from MongoDB and Inito during this time period.
Compensation details
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7770540/microsoft-l62-hyderabad-offer-march-2026-of87/