Microsoft

FAANG / Big Tech

Microsoft is a global technology company known for its Windows operating system, Office productivity suite, and Azure cloud computing platform. It is one of the largest software and technology firms in the world, with major offerings spanning enterprise software, hardware, gaming, and artificial intelligence.

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Microsoft·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Pending

Sep 2026

Applied for a Microsoft SWE summer internship and just wrapped up the OA. Two coding problems, one manageable and one that exposed some gaps in my algorithms prep. Now sitting here wondering if partial credit is enough to move forward.

Solve a coding problem at roughly easy difficulty level, passing all test cases.Solve a harder coding problem requiring you to select the right data structure under time constraints.

“Got through this one clean.”

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Microsoft·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Aug 2026

Ran into an AI-assisted coding problem on the Microsoft SWE intern HackerRank OA and started wondering what companies are actually evaluating when they watch how you use the AI tools.

What are companies actually looking for in how candidates use AI assistance during an online assessment?

“Second problem on the OA had AI assistance baked in and i genuinely had no idea if i was supposed to lean on it or treat it like a crutch to avoid.”

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Microsoft·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Pending

Jul 2026

Went through three technical rounds at Microsoft for a senior role, 7 years in. DSA felt strong, system design was the weak link and I knew it walking out.

Design a scalable system, covering reliability and fault tolerance.Solve an algorithmic problem, then discuss how your solution would hold up at scale.Solve a second algorithmic problem with follow-up questions on scaling and edge cases.

“Covered scaling, reliability, and idempotency but completely blanked on caching.”

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Microsoft·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Microsoft data scientist technical screen, heavy SQL focus with some tricky edge cases built into the schema. Three-part question that escalated from a delivery rate calculation to a scenario-based switching analysis. Felt like a reasonable challenge but part (c) was a curveball I wasn't fully ready for.

Given an Emails table and a Deliveries table, compute the proportion of emails delivered within 5 minutes of send time, grouped by provider and recipient domain, for emails sent in the last 7 days. Use the earliest delivered event, ignore spam_folder rows, and treat missing delivery records as undelivered. A bounce followed by a later delivery still counts if the delivered event falls within the 5-minute window.Return all message IDs where the first observed delivery event was a bounce and a subsequent delivered event happened more than 5 minutes after the original send time. Include the lag in minutes between send time and the first delivered event.For the ms.com domain over the same 7-day window, find the earliest calendar date where switching from Gmail to Outlook would have strictly improved deliverability. Base this on cumulative delivered-within-5-minutes rates up to and including each send date. Output the date and the cumulative rates that justify the switch.

“The spam_folder filter tripped me up first.”

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Microsoft·Product Manager·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

Microsoft PM interview with a pretty technical system design angle. The question was about diagnosing a broken ML pipeline, which felt more like a data engineering interview than a product role, but I get why they ask it.

Your time-series ML pipeline has become unstable and prediction accuracy is degrading. Walk through how you'd diagnose the root cause across the data ingestion, feature generation, and model-serving layers. What evaluation framework, sampling strategy, and metrics would you use to quantify the regression? And what technical and process changes would you make to restore and maintain stability?

“This one is broad in a sneaky way.”

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Microsoft·Data Scientist·Onsite - Multi Round

Jul 2026

Microsoft Data Scientist interview that went deep on the full ML lifecycle, from problem framing all the way through post-launch monitoring. It was a lot to cover in one session and I felt like I was speed-running my entire career.

Walk me through an ML project you owned end-to-end: how did you frame the problem, define success metrics tied to business KPIs, and get alignment across PM, Engineering, and Legal?How did you handle data sourcing and privacy constraints in that project?How did you choose your model and evaluate it both offline and online? What did your experiment design look like?+3 more

“This is the kind of question that sounds manageable until you realize they want specifics on every single handoff.”

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Microsoft·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Prefer not to say

Jul 2026

Phone screen for a Software Engineer role at Microsoft where they handed me an AI-written URL shortener and asked me to tear it apart. Decent question, though I'd say the follow-ups were where it got genuinely hard.

You're given an AI-generated in-memory URL shortener implementation. Walk through the bugs and correctness issues in both the shorten and resolve methods, explain why each is a problem, and describe how you'd fix them.How would you write a unit test that deterministically reproduces the collision bug in the code generator?If this service had to run across multiple processes or servers, which assumptions in the current in-memory design break and what would you change?+2 more

“The collision bug in shorten is the obvious one, and I spotted it pretty quick.”

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Microsoft·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Microsoft SWE interview with a string assembly problem that escalated across three parts. Each follow-up added a new wrinkle and by Q3 I was scrambling to keep my graph logic clean.

You have a list of fragments, each with a start tag, end tag, and payload string. Fragments chain together when one fragment's end tag matches the next fragment's start tag. Given that the fragments form exactly one continuous chain, assemble and return the concatenated payload string.Now treat each fragment as bidirectional. You can traverse the chain forward or backward, and either ordering of the payloads is a valid answer. Modify your solution to handle this.The input may now contain multiple disjoint chains. Each group of fragments forms its own independent chain with no branching. Return all assembled strings, one per chain.

“Felt straightforward at first.”

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Microsoft·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Microsoft SWE interview with a graph/tree problem that looks deceptively clean until you actually try to implement it. One question, but it had enough edge cases to keep me busy.

You're given a list of directed edges that originally formed a rooted tree, but one extra edge was added. Find and return the edge to remove so the graph becomes a valid rooted tree again. If multiple candidates exist, return the last one in the input.

“I knew union-find was involved but kept second-guessing myself on the two-case split: when a node ends up with two parents vs when there's a cycle but no double-parent.”

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Microsoft·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Microsoft SWE interview with a grid-based BFS problem. Pretty standard algorithmic round but the problem had enough edge cases to keep you honest.

You're given a 2D grid where cells are either walls, gates, or empty rooms. Fill each empty room with its shortest distance to any gate, moving only up/down/left/right. Walls and unreachable rooms stay as-is.

“My first instinct was to BFS from every empty room individually and find the nearest gate.”

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