📌 Interview Overview
Company: Microsoft
Role: Software Engineer II (SDE-2)
Experience: 3 years
Interview Mode: Online
Final Result: Offer Received
Online Assessment
The OA consisted of two coding questions. One was a Medium problem based on Number Theory, while the other was a Medium-Hard problem involving DP + Combinatorics.
I solved both problems and cleared the round. I got a call from HR for scheduling interviews.
1st round - DSA (60 mins)
The interviewer was based in Europe. After a brief introduction and a few minutes of small talk, we moved on to the coding problem.
I asked a couple of clarifying questions and discussed the brute-force approach before proceeding with the implementation.
He then asked me to optimize the solution, and I proposed a backtracking approach. One mistake I made was that the interviewer had asked me to print combinations, but I ended up generating permutations instead. I struggled a bit with the implementation but eventually managed to take it to completion, but he seemed NOT satisfied completely.
We spent the remaining time discussing my experience at my previous company and some of my academic projects.
⚠️ Verdict: Leaning HIRE
2nd round - DSA (60 mins)
I was interviewed by someone from Microsoft’s international team. He joined the call and we exchanged greetings. Without wasting time, he quickly asked:
"What was the most difficult challenge you faced in your career?".
For some reason, I got carried away and spoke for almost five minutes straight, LOL. The interviewer eventually interrupted me and suggested that we move on to the algorithmic part of the interview.
It was a DSA question with a touch of LLD. The question was about building a mini CSS query selector engine.
I quickly recognized its a classic tree traversal question, and proposed DFS approach (something similar to #211) We discussed approaches on Ancestor matching in the HTML DOM using recursive backtracking and greedy methods.
The interviewer wanted me to implement clean abstraction of classes and functions and tested several OOP concepts on the go.
Overall, this was a good round, with a strong focus on both problem-solving and writing maintainable, well-structured code.
✅ Verdict - Hire
3rd round - DSA + LLD (70 mins)
Again, the interviewer was NOT from India. He joined the meeting and we introduced each other. He quickly jumped onto a coding problem.
It was similar to Min. stack, and seemed straightforward. I coded it up and then he asked follow up questions on Max. stack, and making the implementation thread safe and performing the operations asynchronously.
All this was over in 20 mins. Later, he shifted to an LLD problem.
Question - Implement a music player system like Spotify
I discussed the requirements properly and moved on to discussing entities and class design.
We had a good discussion on some core features like shuffling songs, state management, offline capabilities, etc.
The discussion went well, and we were able to cover good number of design considerations within the allotted time.
✅ Verdict - Strong Hire
4th round - AA round (Hiring Manager) (90 mins)
This was by far my best round of all. The interview was early in the morning, and the interviewer joined the meeting.
We had a deep-dive conversation of 1 hr about the development experience I had in the previous company and below were the questions/topics covered briefly as part of the discussion:
- Tell me about a time when you had opposing views or conflicts with your lead/architect and how did you go about them.
- Tell me about a time when things didn't go your way, during feature shipping and releases.
- Some discussion on the observability, and logging for mobile applications.
- What features have you built from scratch, and what did end-to-end ownership look like?
- What precautions were taken care to prevent bad commit, bad code or a bug from rolling to production?
- How are you leveraging AI in day to day work, and how do you make sure to prevent some hallucinations or pitfalls that the models generally do?
- What were some things on the project that didn't go well, and what did you learn from those experiences?
- What was your collaboration with stakeholders, and how did you handle deadline slips?
- Why Microsoft? Why are you planning to shift roles?
Also, there were strong design/scenario based questions on database design and technology choices made in the product I was working...
Surprisingly, even after the scheduled interview time was over, the conversation continued for another 20–25 minutes. The interviewer shared more details about the product, the team, and the roles and responsibilities involved, which gave a good sign.
✅ Verdict - Strong Hire
After all 4 rounds were completed, I received a call from HR about a week later confirming that I had been selected. 🎉
Compensation details - https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/8572890/microsoft-sde-ii-l61-offer-3-yoe-by-anon-99hp/
