Microsoft Software Engineer candidates report coding, system-design, project, and behavioral discussions. Prepare to explain solutions and tradeoffs clearly, with examples ranging from LRU Cache to service design.
$152K
Avg. Base Comp
$202K
Avg. Total Comp
3-5 rounds
Typical Rounds
3 weeks
Process Length
Microsoft Software Engineer interview reports describe a technical process that can combine live coding, design, project discussion, and behavioral questions. The number and composition of conversations vary: reports range from three rounds to larger loops, and some include an assessment or recruiter conversation before interviews.
For coding, several candidates encountered LeetCode-style questions at easy-to-hard levels. Reported prompts include LRU Cache with O(1) operations, string problems, and dynamic programming. The recurring practical demand is explaining the approach, complexity, edge cases, and follow-up changes rather than silently arriving at code.
Design preparation should span both system and low-level design. Candidates described URL shorteners, ride services, movie-ticket booking, multiplayer tic-tac-toe, and discussions of APIs, data storage, caching, scalability, and classes or interfaces. These are examples from individual interviews, not a fixed prompt list. Make requirements explicit, then communicate the tradeoffs behind your design.
Project conversations can be as important as the coding itself. Candidates were asked to defend technical decisions, discuss distributed systems or core CS concepts, and explain how they handled production issues, disagreement, failure, or incomplete information. Prepare concise examples from work that show ownership and sound engineering judgment.
Synthesized from 39 candidate reports by our editorial team.
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Real interview reports from people who went through the Microsoft process.
The technical portion was fairly approachable—the coding question was to write a function that determines whether a string is a palindrome. My process consisted of two interviews with a 15-minute break between them. The first interview was technical, with a few behavioral questions mixed in, so I made sure to explain my background and thought process as I worked through the problem. The second interview was behavioral and used STAR-style questions. Both interviewers were pretty chill, and the conversations felt more like discussions than attempts to trip me up.
What seemed to matter most was showing a growth mindset and a genuine desire to learn. I focused on concrete examples from my past experience and made the lessons I took from those situations clear. I received and accepted an offer. For prep, practice explaining a simple string solution such as palindrome checking out loud, then prepare STAR examples that demonstrate how you learn, grow, and handle prior experiences.
Prep tip from this candidate
Be ready to solve and explain a palindrome function in the technical round, and prepare STAR stories that clearly show a growth mindset and desire to learn.
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Sourced from candidate reports and verified by our team.
Topics based on recent interview experiences.
Featured question at Microsoft
Given two sorted lists, write a function to merge them into one sorted list.
| Question | |
|---|---|
| Random SQL Sample | |
| Raining in Seattle | |
| Find the Missing Number | |
| Minimum Change | |
| Download Facts | |
| Scrambled Tickets | |
| Employee Salaries (ETL Error) | |
| Employee Project Budgets | |
| Find Bigrams | |
| Bagging vs Boosting | |
| Find the First Non-Repeating Character in a String | |
| Lowest Paid | |
| P-value to a Layman | |
| The Brackets Problem | |
| Project Budget Error | |
| Google Maps Improvement | |
| N-gram Dictionary | |
| Cyclic Detection | |
| Longest Increasing Subsequence | |
| Binary Tree Conversion | |
| Find Duplicate Numbers in a List | |
| Hurdles In Data Projects | |
| Swapping Nodes | |
| Good Grades and Favorite Colors | |
| Greatest Common Denominator | |
| Sequentially Fill in Integers | |
| Merge N Sorted Lists | |
| Design a query-retrieval system | |
| Target Value Search |
Synthesized from candidate reports. Individual experiences may vary.
Candidates sometimes report an online coding assessment, recruiter conversation, or hiring-manager screen before the main loop. Where coding appears at this stage, reports describe live or timed data-structures-and-algorithms questions alongside discussion of projects or experience.
Candidates report coding questions ranging from strings and linked lists to dynamic programming, trees, graphs, and LRU Cache. Expect to explain time and space complexity, clarify edge cases, and adapt the solution when an interviewer introduces a follow-up.
Reported design discussions include URL shortening, ride services, booking systems, and multiplayer tic-tac-toe. Candidates may be asked to move from requirements and APIs into storage, caching, scalability, availability, or classes and interfaces.
Candidates report resume deep-dives and behavioral questions that may be mixed into technical rounds. Prepare to explain technical decisions, production incidents, disagreement, failures, and decisions made with incomplete information using specific examples.
