I applied through college or university. The process took 8 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Apr 2020
Interview
Process took longer than usual. Started off with an on campus interview, where I was asked 3 questions in 30 minutes. I was told that I had passed the interview but the final round spots were full, so I waited 5 months to hear about a final round spot. The final round was all virtual due to COVID-19; I had 3 interviews back to back, with each one being 45 minutes of implementing code.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
On campus: 1) Design an iterator of nested linked lists that included a hasNext() and next(). 2) How would you go about finding the running median for a stream of numbers. 3) How would you return the k largest ints in an array.
Final round: 1) Create a word search function for a boggle board. 2) Implement a Trie. 3) Find the index in an array such that the sum of the left and right sides of that array are closest to one another.
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft in Sep 2025
Interview
Three rounds - Includes Behavioral, Technical and a Bar Raiser Round.
Asked questions from my resume started with basic system designing and explored my knowledge in system design using microservices architecture.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Distributed Systems LLD Designing. Programming question random
Started with phone screening it went well then headed to a full loop of 3 rounds. Round 1 - LRU cache, Round 2- I don't remeber clearly but it was not that hard, leetcode medium, Round 3- easy binary sorting problem.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Past college project and a technical challenge I faced.
Round 1 - LRU cache, Round 2- I don't remeber clearly but it was not that hard, leetcode medium, Round 3- easy binary sorting problem.
Firstly Phone Interview * 1
Then on-site interview *3
Finally interview with Team Lead
Each interview has live coding problems included
Merely no behavior questions
all in Chinese, but one interviewer requested an english introduction
The interview process went very quickly
Interviewers were nice and polite