I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Mar 2024
Interview
Fairly straightforward - email communication with recruiter who set up technical screen with a Lead. Virtual onsite interviews with 4 people (including hiring manager) after clearing technical screen. All the interviewers were great, the recruiter though never responded to any of my emails. They only emailed me when they had to set up interviews, but never answered my questions on what to expect in the interview or any feedback after the interviews. Overall experience during the interviews was great, thoroughly enjoyed speaking and solving problems with potential teammates during all 5 interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Depth first traversal in Binary tree,
Binary Search in rotated matrix
Easy JS algorithm to use with React component
One design to design a game
Behavioral questions - why Microsoft, past experiences, tell me about a time...
HR screening, one technical interview with the hiring manager then three interview loop which covered two system design and one dsa round.
System design was intensive and challenging.
It took them 5 weeks to come back with an offer. Background check was completed in a week, got joining date after 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for a startup company that let users post various types of content and get a unique url which can be shared with others to access the content
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.
