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Microsoft interview questions

From 102 candidate accounts, updated Oct 12, 2026

Candidate accounts
102
Rounds on average
2
Fewest and most rounds
1 to 6
Open roles at Microsoft
6,746

How the loop works

Microsoft runs a fairly uniform loop across its engineering orgs: a recruiter screen, a timed online assessment (Codility or HackerRank is what candidates name most often), then a same-day virtual block of three to six 45-60 minute interviews. The technical rounds lean hard on data structures and algorithms with an explicit push from brute force to an optimized solution, then split into a low-level/object design round and a high-level system design round for anything above entry level, closing with a hiring-manager conversation and an 'AA' (As Appropriate) round run by a senior person outside the team who effectively holds the hire/no-hire decision. Non-engineering tracks reshape the middle: consulting and support candidates get CS-fundamentals breadth plus Azure and customer-scenario questions instead of LeetCode grinding, data-science candidates get open-ended modeling case studies, and product managers get product-sense and program-management interviews alongside an engineer-run technical round.

These 102 writeups cover consulting, finance, software engineering and other roles. 95 of them were posted under a forum handle, so we could not verify the authors’ identities.

See open roles at MicrosoftMicrosoft salaries

Interview experiences at Microsoft

60 of 102 shown

SDE-2

Received an offer

Experienced, not stated. 6 rounds. Shared by Abhishek Kumar on blog, 2024-06-01

  1. 1Codility online assessmentOnline assessment70 minutes, two tasks: a basic array problem and a debugging task where at most two lines could be added to fix a broken breadth-first search. The recruiter set the bar at roughly 80% of hidden test cases across both.Covered: Arrays & strings, Debugging
  2. 2DSA round 1TechnicalWith a Redmond-based engineer: background and current project, then two problems (a stack-simulation collision problem and a linked-list splice) both requiring the candidate to write test cases and actually run the code.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Arrays & strings
  3. 3DSA round 2TechnicalResume questions, then a weighted shortest-path-with-hop-limit variant, with the interviewer interleaving language-level follow-ups while the candidate coded.Covered: Graphs, Data structures & algorithms
  4. 4Low-level designLow-level designBuild a filtering layer over stored transactions by customer and time window, structured around interfaces and classes, then extended to a thread-safe implementation with locking and exercised with simulated concurrent calls.Covered: Low-level design, OOP, Concurrency, Testing
  5. 5High-level designSystem designHalf the round was a challenge-driven interrogation of the candidate's hardest previous project and why each design decision was made, then designing a cloud logging service end to end on a shared digital whiteboard. Ran about 80 minutes.Covered: System design, Scalability, Past projects
  6. 6Hiring manager roundHiring managerWith a very senior manager who skipped coding entirely and instead ran an open estimation question about what determines the physical device count in a data centre, steering the candidate away from a traffic/load framing toward physical constraints.Covered: Behavioral, Aptitude

Software Engineer I

Received an offer

Experienced. 6 rounds. Shared by GeeksforGeeks contributor on gfg, 2022-02-01

  1. 1Recruiter screenPhone screenA LinkedIn-sourced recruiter call covering career trajectory, notice period and an explanation of the SWE loop.Covered: Resume deep-dive
  2. 2Online assessmentOnline assessmentTwo easy-to-medium problems, one string manipulation and one framed as a game but reducible to backtracking over permutations. Only sample cases are visible, so edge cases have to be reasoned about rather than tested.Covered: Arrays & strings, Data structures & algorithms
  3. 3Technical interview 1TechnicalOpened with work-experience discussion, then OS and database-normalization theory, then two coding problems (a matrix inversion-style problem and generating balanced parentheses), each taken from brute force to a space-optimized version.Covered: Operating systems, DBMS, Arrays & strings, Past projects
  4. 4Technical interview 2Low-level designCloud services and Azure/AWS integration discussion, design-pattern questions (singleton, builder), then a scenario-based approvals system where the interviewer kept layering on constraints and expected SOLID-conformant object-oriented code.Covered: OOP, Low-level design, Domain knowledge
  5. 5Technical interview 3TechnicalMore core-subject questions plus a classic counting-out puzzle that the interviewer wanted solved with a closed-form constant-time answer rather than the circular-list simulation the author started with.Covered: DBMS, Networking, Data structures & algorithms
  6. 6Techno-managerial roundHiring managerWith the hiring manager: a shortest-transformation-sequence graph problem where the point was justifying BFS, followed by a run of managerial questions.Covered: Graphs, Behavioral

What Microsoft is hiring for now

6,746 open roles in our index. Advertised pay floors run $102k to $143k (median $120k, from 2000 postings that state pay).

Most-posted roles

  • Senior Software Engineer247
  • Principal Software Engineer217
  • Data Center Technician91
  • Software Engineer II74
  • Principal Product Manager72
  • Logistics Technician63

Top locations

  • Redmond1964
  • Hyderabad271
  • Bengaluru258
  • Tokyo221
  • Mountain View196

Open roles at Microsoft

See all 6,746 roles

Microsoft interviews: FAQ

What is the interview process like at Microsoft?
Microsoft runs a fairly uniform loop across its engineering orgs: a recruiter screen, a timed online assessment (Codility or HackerRank is what candidates name most often), then a same-day virtual block of three to six 45-60 minute interviews. The technical rounds lean hard on data structures and algorithms with an explicit push from brute force to an optimized solution, then split into a low-level/object design round and a high-level system design round for anything above entry level, closing with a hiring-manager conversation and an 'AA' (As Appropriate) round run by a senior person outside the team who effectively holds the hire/no-hire decision. Non-engineering tracks reshape the middle: consulting and support candidates get CS-fundamentals breadth plus Azure and customer-scenario questions instead of LeetCode grinding, data-science candidates get open-ended modeling case studies, and product managers get product-sense and program-management interviews alongside an engineer-run technical round.
What topics does Microsoft test in interviews?
Commonly reported topics include Algorithms, Puzzles, Dynamic programming, Recursion, Problem solving, Whiteboard coding.

These guides summarize public, first-hand interview experiences shared by candidates. They describe the shape of each loop and the topics that came up, not a leaked question bank, and every experience links back to its original source. Processes change often. Treat this as directional prep, not a script.