Microsoft Data Engineer Interview Guide

tl;dr

The data engineering interview loops at Microsoft are customizable and highly team-dependent. While you can apply for more than one role and team at the same time, don’t expect a standardized process between teams. That being said, Microsoft tends to prefer data engineers with experience in at least some of the following:

• Big-picture thinking, leadership, and communication skills
• Architecting and modeling data, primarily in Python and SQL
• Data pipeline design and optimization
• International security and compliance, including GDPR

What does a Microsoft Data Engineer do?

As a Microsoft Data Engineer, you’ll build and maintain pipelines and scalable data models that potentially affect the end-user productivity of billions of global users. You’ll also oversee how data is captured, structured, stored, and managed at scale while maintaining customer privacy. Microsoft’s worldwide teams and users push the company to focus on security and compliance, so you’ll likely be a pro at working with GDPR-compliant standards.

Microsoft’s culture is famously focused on curiosity, iteration, and reflection, or what they call the growth mindset. You’ll know you’re a good fit for Microsoft’s data engineering team if you’re constantly reflecting, learning, and growing, and able to clearly and gracefully notice areas where further growth is needed.

At other large tech companies, getting a job referral can ensure you make it to an interview, but getting referrals for roles at Microsoft works a little differently. While you can (and should) be leveraging connections whenever you can to get past Microsoft’s notoriously picky ATS, it’s often more effective to ask Microsoft employees in your network for a direct introduction to a hiring manager, if they can facilitate that. Traditional referrals at Microsoft often don't convert to interviews, and many roles are often retired or filled quickly, so a person-to-person chat can often be more helpful than a referral.

Before you apply

• Review Python and SQL since both are tablestake skills.
• Practice speaking about technical concepts in a way that emphasizes business interests
• Research recent interview questions asked at Microsoft
• Check out the Microsoft Engineering Blog so you can speak about current works in progress at Microsoft

Interview process

Remember, each team has their own process, so it's hard to pin down what a "normal Microsoft loop looks like." And, this is our closest approximation. Hiring managers mention that for data engineering roles, Microsoft’s hiring process typically takes between 2–5 weeks and typically includes three main interview stages:

1. Recruiter phone screen to ensure you meet the minimum requirements for the role
2. Technical screen to test your proficiency in Python and SQL
3. Onsite interviews, divided between behavioral, system design, and team-specific interviews

1. Recruiter screen

Microsoft’s ATS famously rejects applicants whose resumes are less than an 80% match for the role, so if you’ve made it to this interview, consider it a win. Your recruiter will want to confirm you’re a good fit on this half-hour phone call by asking general work history and behavioral questions, as well as some light questions about your personal tech stack and anything related to your team’s domain that they’ve passed along.

Sample questions include:

• Walk me through your resume.
• Why Microsoft?
• What’s your favorite Microsoft product offering, and why?
• What’s your experience with Python?
• What are you looking for in your next role?
• Tell me about your experience with data pipelines.
• What was the last decision you made that had a meaningful business impact? What was it, and what was the impact?

2. Technical screen

Unlike at some other large tech companies, the length and subject matter of this tech screen is fairly customizable. A likely scenario: you’ll have a 30- or 60-minute set of problems on Codility, with questions that either focus on data structures or one more specific to your team’s domain, which in most cases is SQL.

Interviewers mention that questions on a 60-minute call will typically be more difficult, and which domain of interview you’ll be scheduled for will often depend on the level of role you’re interviewing for.

a. Coding screen

While Microsoft’s interviewers won’t recommend you use a specific language in the data structures screen, it’s important to show your proficiency in Python unless you’re told otherwise, since it’s such a big part of the data engineering stack.

While the problems you get at this stage may be more approachable than those a software engineering candidate at a comparable level would get, you can still expect in-depth follow-up questions, especially around the complexity of your solutions. Interviewers also value candidates who can communicate while coding, and even take a few minutes at the top of each problem to ask clarifying questions rather than just diving straight in.

Topics:

• Pandas vs polars for performance
• PySpark and other libraries
• Trees
• Map and reduce methods
• Database types
• Data pipeline scaling

Sample questions include:

• Given a set of data in a .csv file, manipulate and analyze the data with pandas.
• Develop a database tailored for user profile pages.
• What methods can be used to identify anomalies in a data pipeline?
• Explain the distinctions between SQL and NoSQL databases, including tradeoffs and use cases.

b. Domain-specific screen

Most domain-specific tech screens use SQL, though it’s always best practice to ask your recruiter. In SQL-focused screens, your interviewer will not only want to see you manipulate, model, and analyze data using SQL, but also be an expert in distributions, views, and recursions. Interviewers will often down-level a candidate for not knowing the right view or distribution for the prompt. As with more code-specific screens, discussing complexity in your answer is a huge green flag for Microsoft interviewers.

Topics include:

• Round robin, column-store, and hash distributions
• Recursion algorithms
• Data warehousing
• Views

Sample questions include:

• Given a dataset using SQL, convert it into PySpark and then:
  1. Filter out the records where data is missing or null.
  2. Extract the top 5 users with the highest activity per day.
• What is normalization/denormalization?
• What is ZOrdering?
• How to do incremental load in ADF?

3. Onsites

An example onsite will include four interviews, usually between 45 minutes and an hour each, usually over Microsoft Teams.

Two of the four interviews are fairly standardized across data engineering, including a behavioral round and a systems design round. The other two are chosen based on your team’s domain and needs, which may include one or two more coding rounds, an SQL and data modeling deep dive, or a domain-specific round based on your team’s stack.

a. Behavioral interview

This hour-long conversation will likely be the only time in your loop when you meet with a hiring manager. Hiring managers at Microsoft will want to get a clear sense of you as a team member, so this likely won’t be particularly technical.

You’ll be asked traditional behavioral questions about how you collaborate and lead, and more in-depth questions about previous projects. Hiring managers respond emphatically to entrepreneurial spirit, quantifiable business impact, and business-forward thinking in general, so bringing data points supporting project wins to this interview will serve you well.

Sample questions include:

• How do you collaborate across teams?
• How do you work with a team?
• Tell me about a project you executed end-to-end.
• What is your current stack, and what have you worked with in the past?
• How would you handle leading a migration for your team?

b. Systems design interview

This hour-long call will assess how you solve real-world problems, thinking about using your models, pipelines, and analytics to address complexity and tradeoffs. Interviewers want to see how you explore the breadth and depths of solutions, with an eye towards business impact and cross-team collaboration, as well as security and compliance.

Interviewers at Microsoft recommend that data engineering candidates read Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann, 2017) and check out Youtuber Alex Xu for additional insight into the types of problem-solving they prefer in systems design interviews.

While you won’t be asked specific yes-or-no questions about frameworks and tools in this interview, you should brush up on partitions, url-shortening, and data warehousing, as well as more straightforward data modeling methods. Interviewers mention that candidates who succeed in this round are able to propose solutions from a business-oriented framework, emphasizing cost reduction and revenue optimization to ground their answers in authentic business recommendations.

Your solutions in the systems design round are also used to level you. Junior data engineers typically focus solely on the what of their solutions. More senior data engineering candidates are able to focus their answers on the how and why of latency, bandwidth, takeaway, and security issues, i.e., the potential real-world drawbacks of their proposed solution.

c. Team-specific interviews

Unlike other loops at Microsoft, you won’t have additional values or manager interviews during your onsite, but you will have two additional hour-long interviews. Depending on the needs of your team, these could include one or two more coding rounds, a more in-depth SQL-focused interview, or a deep dive into your team’s domain area.

Here's an example of what a "domain-focused round" will include. If your team focuses on analytics, you’ll likely be asked more about ETL processes and data pipelines than SQL.

If you have coding rounds, they’ll likely be between 5–7 questions you’ll solve on Codility. These questions may “ladder” (i.e., be related to an overarching prompt but escalate in difficulty) or be unrelated. Your interviewer will expect you to get to as many of the questions as possible while still remaining communicative and not jumping in too quickly, so try to maintain a balance between efficiency and asking questions. If you run short on time, they may ask you to outline how you’d solve the remaining questions using pseudocode.

A potential additional SQL interview will be more challenging at this stage. As with the coding interviews, you’ll likely have 5–7 questions to get through, so try not to get stuck on one. Interviewers recommend studying building views, and prioritizing reviewing recursion.

Depending on your team, possible questions could include:

• How much memory of executors would you need to load 1 tb data?
• How would you troubleshoot a Spark partitioning issue?
• Describe how you would design a data pipeline to process and store log data generated from a web application.
• How would you handle resource configuration in a Spark ecosystem for different sizes of input data?
• How would you debug a long running Spark job on AWS / GCP? What are common tradeoffs and potential improvements?
• Describe how you would optimize a SQL query for performance, assuming that the SQL engine doesn't do it for you.
• You discover that data is being duplicated in your ETL process. How would you resolve this issue?
• List all the ways you can think of to identify duplicates in a table using SQL.

Additional resources

• Take our Data Engineering course to level up your skills.
• Get coaching and actionable feedback from data engineers at the level you aspire to land an offer for.
• Practice with mock interviews on the most common types of problems.

FAQs about Microsoft DE interviews

What can I expect from my interview at Microsoft?

You can expect 2–5 weeks of interviews, including a recruiter call, a tech screen focusing on either Python or SQL, and a round of onsite interviews including a behavioral interview, a systems design interview, and ~two more interviews that are dependent on the needs of your team.

How long is the typical Microsoft interview process?

Interviews at Microsoft will typically take 2–5 weeks.

How should I prepare for a data engineering interview at Microsoft?

• Perfect your Python and SQL
• Be ready to frame your recent projects in terms of quantifiable business impact
• Familiarize yourself with Microsoft’s software offerings
• Check out the Microsoft Engineering Blog

Will I have in-person interviews at Microsoft?

Microsoft is a hybrid workplace, with no mandatory RTO policy as of this writing, so expect your interview process to take place primarily online via Microsoft Teams and Codility.

Can I interview for more than one role at once at Microsoft?

You can absolutely interview for more than one role at once, and unlike other big tech companies, Microsoft doesn’t have a cooling-off period. This means that even if you get rejected, you won’t have to wait to apply to another role.