I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Toronto, ON) in Jan 2025
Interview
I interviewed at Microsoft Vancouver on December/January 2025
Initial round was with a screening round with a Senior Engineer with a Problem.
Then they moved me to a virtual on site, on virtual on site there was 4 interviews taken by 2 senior Engineers and 2 managers on the same day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Prescreening - min sum of chocolate after n time of breaking each chocolate into half.(solved with priority Q)
Onsite 1 - More like a data scraping problem. Felt like One to many relationship implementation (solved with a Hashmap)
Onsite 2 - Robot to reach at destination [n,n] index at the array. 3 different variation was asked when I solved the problem. With block, Return the path, return the shortest path. (BFS/DFS) Manager
Onsite 3 - Another Manger and the Hiring Manager, mainly asked very in depth of about one of my most challenging previous work, the guy was really picky(positively saying, I am pretty sure engineers under him will have very good learning curve) and detail oriented.
Onsite 4 - With a senior engineer asked to design a system that generate 3D model with a heavy model and the user is only a few numbers. How do you design this system.
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft in May 2026
Interview
1. Recruiter screen: recruiter was friendly but had their camera off. They asked me about my recent work experience, my strongest programming language, and salary expectations
2. Technical Screen: live HackerRank coding challenge with a team member of the team hiring for the role, over Microsoft Teams. The interviewer had their camera off but was easy to talk to. The coding challenge was a LeetCode-style challenge that required the backtracking algorithm. Interviewer spent extra time aftwards to take questions from me and share information about the team and employer.
3. 3x "Full Loop Interview Technical". The interviewers did not show up to these interviews. I emailed the recruiter who told me that interviewing for the role had been cancelled.
My overall impression of Microsoft based on their hiring practises is the company is dysfunctional, employees are disengaged, their hiring practises are disconnected from the actual job, and they don't care about candidate experience.
Moderate. Do leetcode tagged Microsoft questions. They generally ask from most recent Microsoft tagged questions. I applied without referral. Will have a technical screening with hiring manager. Then DSA and System design rounds.
Interview process:
Online assessment (hard level)
1-hour screening call
4 interviews in one day:
Medium-hard LeetCode (OOP-focused)
Medium-hard LeetCode DSA problem
Long system design interview (strong focus on relational database design)
Partner manager interview (AI-focused + behavioral)
The process was technically challenging and well-structured.
However, after the final interview, there was over one month of silence despite follow-up messages. Eventually, I received a generic rejection email stating:
"This decision does not reflect on your potential or the value of your experience."
I would have appreciated more timely communication and more specific feedback after such an extensive process.
