SDE 2 at Microsoft

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Technical Round 160 min

   The panel had two interviewers, started with a mix of random technical questions, followed by one medium-level DSA problem based on Graphs.

2. 2

   Technical Round 260 min

   It was another balanced round of technical discussion and DSA. The questions asked were Distinct Subsequences and Encode and Decode Strings. While I had the right strategies in mind, I stumbled during implementation

   • Distinct subsequences
   • Encode and Decode Strings
3. 3

   High Level Design Round60 min

   The problem statement was quite interesting and deeply evaluative Design a high-throughput file-ingestion pipeline for enterprise customers, where uploaded documents may be several GBs in size. The system needed to support:

   • OCR extraction
   • Chunk-level processing
   • Efficient storage for quick retrieval
   • Thought process around chunking strategy
   • Indexing and memory optimization
   • Fault tolerance
   • Horizontal scaling strategy
4. 4

   AA Round60 min

   This round happened the same day as HLD The interviewer asked me to:

   • Model/design a bank teller system
   • Answer one behavioural question related to decision-making and ownership

What came up