I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru) in Jun 2017
Interview
Shortened loop due to a prior experience and a referral. 5 onsite interview rounds including 4 technical and a culture fit round. Overall the questions were creative and not the usual leetcode variants. The interviewers were more focussed on making sure I had experience designing large scale distributed systems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Design a tiny url service.
2. Describe technology trends that will disrupt the industry in the coming years.
3. Back of the napkin calculation on number of Google drive users in the world? How would you relate to known data and extra polate?
4. Design a analytics stream pipeline for microsoft exchange server logs that are highly sensitive in nature and include PII? The catch here was to design such that data does not leave the source. I however, designed with data anonymization leaving the source and traveling through a pipeline of independent systems loosely connected with a messaging system which did not solve the problem 100%.
5. Design a logging utility, major interfaces and class diagram.
6. Design a Devops utility tool to allow resource allocation and automated deploy and rollback of software components. I had read the Google Borg paper, so I just picked salient features from there. This interview stretched to a hour and a half and went into great details of choice of tech stack to solving interesting questions on resource allocation. The interviewer was very bright.
7. Culture fit round mostly included questions on past experience and leadership skills.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderābād) in Jan 2026
Interview
There were two rounds of interview. One was coding another was HDL round. The interview was through virtual mode, and the schedule was very tight. They asked me to write code. Not sure if these coding round makes sense at the level of Principal Engineer positions but that is the way it is done here.
I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru) in Dec 2021
Interview
Recruiter contacted me for Hiring event ( 3 months after applying through LinkedIn ).
Three round of interviews.
First round was with somewhat junior level, Asked a dynamic programming problem, and I started with Brute-force approach, interviewer interruptted right there and wanted to have most optimal solution in first iteration. Sort of negative, but I coded up pretty fast and it passed all the scenario. May be negative feedback
second round was with somewhat senior engg, Asked problem and if time permit few other sub-problem. I solved this with recursion and sub-problem were solved as well with minor tweak in code. Theoritically explained another sub-problem solution and recruiter seemed impressed with approach and saying himself, he saw 'new' and 'interesting' way to solve this problem. After that some design problem, which I couldn't understand completely however almost gave right answer. My feedback for is strong positive
Third round with Group Engg Manager, who talked pretty nicely and neatly. I could see authority overall. HE asked some abstract design problem, which I understood however couldn't code up properly. I feel thats where my candidature went downward direction.
Got rejection email after a day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Dynamic programming even/odd max sum
Grid traveller problem with some tweak
DFS/Graph/Forest related question
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
- The interview happens on MS team - which is a very poor tool. The app (mac) never starts up and browser client is very very bad. In one interview There were continuous drop offs and voice issues which took up 10-15 min of my interview time and created lot of misunderstanding between both the parties
- Interviewers are , no other word here , egoistic. Few articulated clearly and could communicate properly but most had very bad communication skills. One even kept giving feedback during the interview which derailed me a lot (and some unwelcome comments too). Common among all was the ego factor. Nothing like other US based companies I have been giving rounds with. In contrast, others dont give feedback and even if you are having the worst interview possible will hold their emotions to themselves. Microsoft, was very disappointing.
There was no feedback asked, so this goes to Glassdoor
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- find next larger number having same digits as given number
- lru cache
- notification system
- base view of graph
- find in sorted 2d matrix