Timeline - March 18th 2026 to March 24th 2026
YOE (then) : 8.5+ Years
Current (Most Recent Company) : SMTS(IC3) at Oracle (Laid off in September 2025)
College - IITK

Directly applied on their portal, Recruiter reached out to me directly on LinkedIn as well and I got interviewd by Microsoft Azure Storage Org/Team for a Senior Software Enginner role in March end and here's the experience -

R1(DSA Coding on HackersRank) -

1. Implement LRU cache with TTL in it (https://leetcode.com/problems/lru-cache/description/ + TTL)
2. How would you implement concurrency in it?

• Was able to implement a working solution with test cases passed and was able to explain the concurrency part as well.

R2(LLD) - Was supposed to be LLD but it was taken by Hiring Manager and this is what he discussed

1. Intro and Most critically challanging past project (around 10-15 minutes)
2. Design a configuration service which is responsible for updating configurations existing on n number of microservices existing in our architecture - High level System design discussion (arond 25-30 minutes)
3. LRU Pseudo code and concurrency part of it - Also, if there are more cache misses than hits, how would you figure out if the problem is with cache size or cache policy? What all disgnosis you'll do? (last 10-15 minutes)

• Discussion went really well again and the interviewer was satisfied.

Both round happened on same day with 1 hour gap and got strong feedback in both of them. Recruiter reached out and scheduled my 3rd and 4th round after 3-4 days on back to back days.

R3(System Design by a Principal Engineer) -

1. High level system design and data flow discussion of my current project (around 30 minutes)
2. Design a File System - Interviewer actually mentioned that I want to discuss this since you're getting interviewed for Azure "Storage" org. Instead of discussiong typical fancy System design stuff like Scale/reliability/CAP etc tradeoffs, he probed into the very basics of Storage systems like How a file is actually saved on a disk. Which underlyting Data-Structures (like BitMap) are used to mark the free spaces(chunks) etc.

• This round went decent (not so great, neither bad since I don't have past experience particulary in storage domain). I think Microsoft is moving towards Org/Team/Role specific interviews instead of asking irrelavant questions like Design Twitter/Youtube for 1 Billion users in 45 minutes stuff!

R4 (AA (As Appropriate) Round by Senior Principal Manager/Director) -

1. In depth discussion on past projects and my stories, answered using STAR/CARL format.
2. Typical behavioral questions like resolving conflicts and why Microsoft etc?
3. The interviewer also mentioned that he has 2 reqs under him in 2 different teams and which one I would like to join? Kind of did the team matching there itself.

Final Veridct - I called the recruiter on next Monday and she mentioned that the Director really liked you and it's a strong feedback from all rounds but They have identified a candidate internally and the position got filled. Also conveyed that if the same guy gets another SSE req in his team in future, he would reach out to me.

• I was totally disappointed and heartbroken. This happened with me second time back to back after Atlassian went on hiring freeze in Jan. And specially because I was enemployed for 6+ months now, it hurt me more.

Recuiter mentioned that they will try to pass on my feedback to other Managers but they can take 1-2 rounds (specially AA round) again.

I got one interview next week but that went Okayish and I wasn't recommended by him for his team.

Final update from recruiter was that my feedback is preserved and they will try to find a team that has req but since Microsoft Financial Year End is in May so it all slowed down. I have kind of moved on and gave interviews in few other companies. Not really sure they will get back to me.