Software Engineer · Phone Screen · Technical Discussion

Microsoft — Software Engineer

Level: Senior-Level

Round: Phone Screen · Type: Technical Discussion · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Neutral

Topics: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Regularization, CTR Prediction, Imbalanced Data, LeetCode Hard

Location: Seattle, WA, US

Interview date: 2026-02-15

Summary

I initially expected a behavioral round, but it was a technical screen covering ML/DL fundamentals and a LeetCode hard problem.

Details

After a brief introduction of the business context, I was asked a series of fundamental ML/DL questions:

• The differences between Layer Normalization and Batch Normalization.
• Characteristics of different regularization terms.
• Approaches to CTR prediction.
• Methods for handling imbalanced data.

The round concluded with a LeetCode hard problem: Max Points on a Line.

LeetCode similar: LeetCode 149