Updated by Microsoft candidates
Software Development Engineer II Interview Experience
In my binary tree round, I was not even leaning on BFS or DFS terminology, and they still liked my solution because I kept reasoning it out. That was the moment where Microsoft felt more about logical thinking than memorized interview patterns.
Interview process
I went through a pretty long Microsoft process for an SDE II role compared with other companies. It started with a HackerRank, then a one-hour recruiter screen that was very focused on motivation and culture fit, and then a loop of three back-to-back interviews on coding, system design, and low-level design. What stood out to me was how vague several prompts were, because I had to keep asking questions to uncover the requirements instead of just jumping into a textbook answer. In the coding round, they seemed to care more about how I reasoned through the binary tree problem than whether I used the exact BFS or DFS terminology. Overall, it felt about the same difficulty as Google or Amazon, but a little more focused on logical thinking and culture.
- Online assessment
- Recruiter screen
- Technical interview
Interview tips
I would study the company culture and not just grind data structures. Be ready to talk about uncomfortable situations, especially conflict with colleagues, and explain how you solved them. Also, keep asking questions and stay engaged with the interviewer the whole time, because a lot of the prompts are vague on purpose and you have to drive.
Company culture
I felt Microsoft put real value on culture fit and logical thinking. A lot of the interview prompts were intentionally ambiguous, so they seemed to care about whether I could ask good questions, stay calm, and reason my way forward. Compared with Google and Amazon, it did not feel easier or harder, but it felt a little less about knowing data structures and algorithms in perfect detail and a little more about how I think. Even when I was not using textbook terminology, they still appreciated a logical approach.
Questions asked
Overview
I started with a HackerRank that felt pretty black-box. There were two coding problems, and I couldn't see the real test cases, so I had to infer a lot from the examples and just trust my interpretation.
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
I had to write my own conversion logic instead of using language helpers. The hard part was that the constraints and test cases were hidden, so I had to infer behavior from the examples. I remember reading the examples as if they were encoding the real requirement, and I believed the expected byte order was little-endian even though they never stated it directly.
Solve a graph problem around connected components using a union-set style approach and graph traversal.
I remember it being a connected-components style problem on an edge list. I think I had to return some kind of list of connected components, and to make it efficient I was thinking in terms of union set plus BFS or DFS. I do not remember the exact prompt, but that was the core of it.
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