Sharing my recent Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience. The process consisted of 4 rounds, with each round being approximately 45 minutes.

Background

• Currently Laid off
• 5 YOE, Worked in Product Based MNC (FAANG)

Round 1 — Coding / Problem Solving

• The first round was a coding round and was eliminatory.

The question was to design an Expression Evaluator.
Given a mathematical expression containing:

+, -, *, /
Parentheses
Multi-digit integers
Spaces
Unary + / -

The evaluator had to return the integer result while respecting standard operator precedence.

Example
-7 + 5 * 8 - 5 / 4 + (5 + 4)

The main focus was on:

Parsing the expression
Operator precedence
Handling nested parentheses
Handling unary operators
Multi-digit numbers
Edge cases

This round was eliminatory, so getting to a correct approach was important.

Round 2 — Low-Level Design

The second round was an LLD round.

Problem: Design a Library Management System

The discussion covered:

Identifying the core entities
Defining classes and their responsibilities
Relationships between entities
Borrowing and returning books
Handling different types of users/books
Extensibility of the design
Implementation-level decisions

The interviewer went beyond just drawing a class diagram and discussed how the system would actually be implemented.

Round 3 — High-Level Design

The third round was a System Design / HLD round.

Problem: Design an E-commerce Shopping System

The requirements included:

Product search, filtering and sorting
Viewing product details
Purchasing products
Secure checkout
Integration with an existing Inventory Management System through APIs
Scale

The following scale assumptions were provided:

10M products
1M users/day
~11 requests/sec
10K orders/hour
~2.5 orders/sec
5–10 products per order

The discussion covered the overall architecture, APIs, data storage, product search, inventory integration, checkout flow, scalability, and other system-design considerations.

Round 4 — Managerial / Resume Discussion

The final round was primarily a managerial round.

The discussion included:

Resume walkthrough
Previous projects and experience
Technical decisions made in previous roles
Behavioral and managerial questions
Follow-up questions based on my experience

There was also a short system-design discussion toward the end.

VERDICT: SELECTED.