I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderabad) in Apr 2021
Interview
I had total of 4 rounds.Most of the discussions on algorithms, problem solving, system design and few behavioural questions.interview process took around 15 days from the first interview to get offer letter
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Round1:
Rotate 2d array clockwise and anti clock wise 90 degrees.2d array need not be square
Round2:
Few questions on projects I worked.
How do you implement throttling for your website.
A attacker is constantly hitting your service api.you should send the response as “try after sometime” if threshold exceeds certain requests
(Slinging window algorithm based time slots)
Round3:(with principal software engineer)
implement N-tree collapse(anynode) and decollapse(anyNode).when called get childnodes(sequence of collapse and decollates should be considered and should return the child nodes).discussions on extra space vs extra time.recursion vs iteration
Round4:Hiring manager interview ( Director)
I found this interview interesting. Mix of tech and behavioural
Tech questions:
Step1: Read a row which has username, amount,
Step2: Apply discount and write same to table
Step3: call rest api to update respective user’s credit service
We need to process records in batches.
He is looking into failure handling cases.
Behavioral Questions:
How much time you spend on coding.
What are your career goals.
What critical problem you solved in your career.
Last question, current ctc
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft in May 2026
Interview
1. Recruiter screen: recruiter was friendly but had their camera off. They asked me about my recent work experience, my strongest programming language, and salary expectations
2. Technical Screen: live HackerRank coding challenge with a team member of the team hiring for the role, over Microsoft Teams. The interviewer had their camera off but was easy to talk to. The coding challenge was a LeetCode-style challenge that required the backtracking algorithm. Interviewer spent extra time aftwards to take questions from me and share information about the team and employer.
3. 3x "Full Loop Interview Technical". The interviewers did not show up to these interviews. I emailed the recruiter who told me that interviewing for the role had been cancelled.
My overall impression of Microsoft based on their hiring practises is the company is dysfunctional, employees are disengaged, their hiring practises are disconnected from the actual job, and they don't care about candidate experience.
Moderate. Do leetcode tagged Microsoft questions. They generally ask from most recent Microsoft tagged questions. I applied without referral. Will have a technical screening with hiring manager. Then DSA and System design rounds.
Interview process:
Online assessment (hard level)
1-hour screening call
4 interviews in one day:
Medium-hard LeetCode (OOP-focused)
Medium-hard LeetCode DSA problem
Long system design interview (strong focus on relational database design)
Partner manager interview (AI-focused + behavioral)
The process was technically challenging and well-structured.
However, after the final interview, there was over one month of silence despite follow-up messages. Eventually, I received a generic rejection email stating:
"This decision does not reflect on your potential or the value of your experience."
I would have appreciated more timely communication and more specific feedback after such an extensive process.
