Microsoft New Grad Data Scientist Interview Experience — Three Back-to-Back Rounds, Offer a Month Later

Timeline

• 10/13: HackerRank OA — one LeetCode problem, one data-processing problem
• 11/03: 3 rounds, back-to-back interviews
• 12/03: Offer

Background: Statistics PhD, resume was 80% large-language-model-related research, no conference publications at the time of interviewing (a few projects were finished and being submitted), no industry experience.

Round 1: the interviewer gave me 30 min of behavioral questions plus 15 min of ML fundamentals. I walked through my resume research projects, and got the standard behavioral questions like conflict with teammates. The fundamentals part covered KNN and PCA — I hadn't prepared much for this, answered while trying to recall things, and got most of it right. No coding.

Round 2: 35 min of resume/project grilling plus 20 min of coding. My spoken English isn't great, and one project's setup was kind of convoluted to explain, so it took me extra time and I struggled a bit. The coding question was to draw a precision-recall curve, which I hadn't prepared for at all — I looked up the definition of recall on the spot. The interviewer gave me a lot of hints and I stumbled through it.

Round 3: 15 min of resume grilling plus 15 min of rapid-fire LLM fundamentals Q&A. I'd prepared a lot for this part, answered quickly, and don't think I got anything wrong. No coding. The interview ended about 15 minutes early, which threw me off a bit — I pushed through and asked the interviewer about their day-to-day work for the remaining five minutes before it wrapped up.

Summary: Most of the questions in every round tied back to my resume — all the behavioral questions eventually circled back to my research projects, and most of the interviewers' follow-ups were technical questions related to that. No SQL or LeetCode from Microsoft, which I expected, but my answers to anything outside my resume were mediocre, especially some ML fundamentals questions. On top of that, this was my first time job hunting so I was pretty nervous, and overall my interview performance was average. I got the offer a month after the interview — pure luck.