I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2019
Interview
The recruiter reached out to me and I scheduled a phone screen. The technical phone round was not great. I struggled to come up with a clean solution. The next day the recruiter emailed me and said that there is another team who is interested in my profile and then scheduled another technical phone round with them. This round was not good too. I did not come up with the solution I was asked. Through this whole process, the Interviewers and recruiters were very friendly and helpful. A week later the recruiter called me and said that my performance was not up to the mark and told me to contact her after 3 months after preparing some more. I was never this happy being rejected in any other interview. They really cared about the candidate and my whole experience was really good. I really think Microsoft is doing a great job making sure that the candidates don't have a negative experience. I hope one day I get to work for this awesome company.
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
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru) in Jun 2026
Interview
I got call via microsoft HR. She informed there will be 4 rounds of technical interviews all eliminator. Round 1 interview was a mid level graph question. The interviewer was actively involved, understood my logic, approach, challneged my assumeptions, did a dryrun at end, good experience. Round 2 inteviewer was extremely lazy and passive. It was a bad experience. He gave a problem statement of sliding window and disappeared. Wasn't intrested in hearing approach or even reading code. He came after 30 minutes , did a dry run and final output wasn't exactly correct. I identified a logical bug and started correcting it. He said there is no need , just finished the interview after that. The code i had written was optimal code but he didn't care to read that also. And there was still 20 minutes left. It gave me impression that interviewer in not at all interested in taking interview and they have been pushed my management. HR called next day to say i am not selected.
