← Interview experiences
Got the offer

SDE 2 at Microsoft

Difficulty
Process took
2-3 Weeks
Rounds
6
Format
Remote
Applied via
Company Website

How it went

  • Time management, learn to solve 2 medium problems in 90 minutes comfortably

What they would tell you

  • Time management, learn to solve 2 medium problems in 90 minutes comfortably

How to prepare

  • Practice medium problems core topics like arrays, strings, hashmaps, sliding window, two-pointer, prefix sums

Their background

Total Experience: 3 years 7 month Software Engineer@Fintechstartup

Round by round

  1. 1

    Online Assessment60 min

    Two medium-level questions based on recursion and strings

  2. 2

    Coding Round 160 min

    Approach:

    • I started with the brute-force approach to consider all subarrays
    • Then discussed optimized dynamic programming approach, maintaining maximum and minimum product at each index
    • Explained edge cases such as arrays with zeros and negative numbers
  3. 3

    Low Level Design 160 min

    During the interview, I was asked to design a smart parking garage system

    • Clarified requirements: multiple floors, vehicle types, dynamic pricing, and automated entry/exit
    • Designed classes: Vehicle, Floor, Ticket, PaymentSystem
    • Implemented strategies for calculating parking fees and handling priority vehicles
  4. 4

    Low Level Design 260 min

    Design a Multiplayer Board Game Platform Interviewer asked:

    • How to implement AI vs Human players
    • How to handle turn management, game state, and undo/redo functionality
  5. 5

    Coding Round 260 min

    Do not recall the exact problem

  6. 6

    HM round60 min

    Multiple behavioral questions around leadership, teamwork, and ownership then current and past projects, challenges faced, and technical decisions made The round concluded with a DSA problem best time to buy and sell stock with cooldown

What came up

MediumRemote3 4 years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources