I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Microsoft (Tel Aviv-Yafo)
Interview
The online assessment included 2 LeetCode-style questions of easy to medium difficulty.I then had 3 interviews, each 75 minutes long, mostly focused on technical questions similar to those on LeetCode.
Talked about myself and one project I did.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
what is the difference between abstract class and interface
print all permutations of a string
check if a string is a palindrome if you can delete at most 1 char
Process: 3 virtual interviews in a single day (75 minutes each) via MS Teams and HackerRank.
Overall Experience: Positive, highly technical, and deeply focused on data structures, optimization, and system design.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Round 1: Project & Architecture Review (75 mins)Focus: Deep dive into past technical experience.Details: The entire round was dedicated to presenting a personal/academic project. The interviewer asked detailed questions regarding the system's architecture, specific algorithmic choices, trade-offs, and design decisions.Round 2: Coding / Algorithms (75 mins)Focus: Problem-solving, bitwise operations, and array manipulation.Questions Asked:Bitwise Operation (LeetCode 2275 - Largest Combination With Bitwise AND Greater Than Zero): Given an array of integers, find the size of the largest subset where the bitwise AND of all elements is greater than zero. Insight: Count the number of set bits (1s) at each of the 32 bit positions across all numbers.Frequency Tracking (LeetCode 169 - Majority Element): Given an array, find the element that appears at least $n/2$ times (guaranteed to exist). Can be solved using a Hash Map ($O(n)$ space) or optimized using the Boyer-Moore Voting Algorithm ($O(1)$ space).Round 3: Low-Level Design (LLD) (75 mins)Focus: Object-Oriented Design (OOD) and data structure integration.Details: Design a parking lot system. The core challenge evolved into choosing the optimal combination of data structures to achieve $O(1)$ efficiency for parking, leaving, and tracking the physical index of each vehicle.Key Solution Concept: Integrating a Fixed-size Array (to maintain physical indices), a Doubly Linked List (to manage the pool of free spots), and a Hash Map (to map vehicle IDs to list nodes).
3 rounds of leetcode medium, 2 questions were very easy, the last one was really hard (it was a binary tree question). They asked about space and time complexity. In terms of structures it was straight forward but the question itself was hard
Behavioural round consisted of "Tell me about yourself and why you wanna work for microsoft and resume screening. And technical interview consisted of 2 LC question 1 medium and 1 easy.
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