I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2023
Interview
The coding interview is easy but the system design interview was difficult and needs knowledge of cloud, distributed systems in details. For coding interview, they asked about cherry pickup in both directions and how to find optimal number of cherry instead of greedy approach which picks max in separately.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design social media network that provides ads partner to target users based on age/location etc.
HR screening, one technical interview with the hiring manager then three interview loop which covered two system design and one dsa round.
System design was intensive and challenging.
It took them 5 weeks to come back with an offer. Background check was completed in a week, got joining date after 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for a startup company that let users post various types of content and get a unique url which can be shared with others to access the content
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.
