I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru) in Nov 2017
Interview
The position is based out of Hyderabad but the interview happened in Bangalore (where I am currently living). This led to quite a bit of delay in scheduling the interview.
There were 4 rounds in total, 3 technical plus 1 with a senior person. Typically the 4th round is with the hiring manager but in my case manager of a different team took the interview since the actual hiring manager could not come to Bangalore. HR person was very friendly and also provided feedback after all interviews.
In the end, the position I interviewed for was filled. However, I got to know I cleared the interview process. Finally, a manager from a different team (this team, in my opinion, is even better) contacted me over phone and asked whether I want to join his team. I said sure. No further interviews were taken and I finally got an offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions will be on algorithms and data-structures and there will be one design round. Questions involved trees, stacks, queues and longest increasing sequence. Design round was not as difficult as Amazon. Algorithms did not require dynamic programming in my case. Overall, the interview was easy. I may be a little biased here because I was giving many interviews recently and was at the peak of my performance.
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.
