Microsoft | SDE2 | Offer

Introduction I have ~5 years of experience and was previously working at a well-known B2B product company. I finished my fourth round two weeks ago and have not received any updates from them. They do not reply to emails.

Update: I received an email requesting additional documents for verification.

Interview Experience The screening call and online assessment were skipped. I was directly invited to participate in a hiring event.

ROUND 1 - 60 mins The interview started with a discussion about my job responsibilities in my previous role (10-12 mins). Q1 - Min Stack Q2 - Given a binary tree, return the longest path from root to leaf where the node values are consecutive. 1 / \ 2 3 / / 4 6 Output: 2 [1, 2]

Around 45 minutes were spent on these questions. In the last 15 minutes, I explained the high-level design of one of my previous projects using draw.io.

Self Verdict: Hire

ROUND 2 - 60 mins The interviewer asked about my preferred programming languages (Java & Python). We used Java. The first 30 minutes covered Java concepts: inheritance, polymorphism, scopes, identifying outputs, and fixing bugs in code snippets.

The next 30 minutes focused on system design questions: scaling a database, handling upstream service 403 errors, and checking record existence in a large dataset.

Self Verdict - Hire

Round 3 - HLD 60 mins This round was conducted by a hiring manager. The requirement was to design a platform to migrate data from Source A to Source B for millions of customers. The discussion involved fairness, failure handling, retries, migration flow, and monitoring. I received counter-questions for every idea. I felt challenged but ultimately presented a decent design and answered most of the questions.

Self Verdict - Hire / Strong Hire

The third round ended around 6 PM. The hiring manager said the fourth round would be scheduled later if I qualified. I did not hear back for 12 days. After 12 days, I received a call to schedule the final round. The recruiter said it was a managerial round, but I believe it was an Architect/AA round. It was scheduled six days later.

ROUND 4 - 45 mins (Probably AA round) The interviewer began without a pre-set question. He then asked a question about a range of IP addresses and their owners. I provided multiple approaches but am unsure if he was looking for something specific. The interview concluded in 45 minutes (I coded the best approach). I later checked with ChatGPT, and the answer was similar.

Self Verdict: Hire

Final Decision - Hire. Communication from recruiters was minimal. It took over a month to receive the offer letter after the final round.