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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Data Scientist Interview Experience — Four Weeks of Email Chaos, Then the Position Was Filled
Sharing a bizarre experience today: the Microsoft interviewer couldn't receive Gmail emails. I got notified four weeks ago for a coding screen round. I needed to provide 5 interview windows, so I replied, and then... nothing. I waited three days, followed up, and the interviewer said she never received my last email — checked her spam folder too, nothing there. But this one she got. So I gave new…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Data Scientist Interview Experience — Three Back-to-Back Interviews After the OA
The OA was an hour long with two questions, pretty simple. Three days after that I got an interview invite. Three interviews back to back, three hours total, all with very senior people interviewing. The first interviewer worked on software/systems and had me write a problem, roughly medium difficulty. Org chart → Tree. Top-down, level by level → BFS. "Show the entire layer first" → Queue. The se…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Data Scientist interview: modeling and experiment design
The loop was intense and technically demanding, with work that felt closer to real modeling than trivia. After a recruiter-style step, I discussed an ML project and the trade-offs in evaluating it. We focused on classification with asymmetric costs, and I explained SHAP in the context of what I'd built. I was surprised to get a precision-and-recall question very close to one I'd practiced. Later…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Data Scientist interview: timed HackerRank assessment
Most of my process was a timed online technical assessment. It had several HackerRank-style questions and a predefined window of around an hour to finish everything. There was little conversational interviewing beyond that. It felt like a fast evaluation of technical problem solving, with very little room to recover from a missed question. I did not receive an offer. The straightforward but tough…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Intern Applied Scientist Interview Experience — Three Back-to-Back Virtual Onsites in One Day
Position: Applied Science: PhD Internship Opportunities - Redmond HR emailed to invite me to interview, no OA. VO1 (02/04): a 30 minute simple chat, talked about past projects, asked about some details. Then scheduled three back-to-back VOs on the same day (02/19), each 45 minutes, with a 15 minute break between adjacent interviews. VO2: an applied scientist, also asked about technical details of…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Intern Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Research Intern Video Screen That Was Pure LeetCode
Background: currently a student at CMU. Process: I applied online through a mass application, and about two weeks later I got an interview invitation. It was a video interview. What the interview was like: the interviewer was an MLE on the team who had been working for a few years. He was really nice and gave me quite a few hints along the way. Even though this was a research intern role, the int…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Four Rounds on the Bing Team, No Offer
I applied to several MAI positions on the site, and then a Bing team doing image search got back to me and said they wanted to schedule an interview. First, let me complain about the HR — from the email address, it's clearly outsourced, and they never reply. For example, I asked what kind of interview this was, what it would cover, how many rounds — no idea at all. They'd only show up two or thre…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — LeetCode Rounds Then a RAG System Design
Round 1 The first round was a classic array-processing problem: LeetCode 56 (Merge Intervals). Overall it wasn't too hard — mostly testing fundamentals. The core idea is to sort by interval start, then walk through and merge the overlapping ranges. What actually separates candidates is how "Pythonic" the code is and how you handle edge cases — things like sorting elegantly with a lambda, or handl…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
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 behavio…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft PhD Summer Intern Data Scientist Interview Experience — OA, Then Three Back-to-Back Rounds, Offer a Month Later
Timeline 10/13: HackerRank OA — one LeetCode problem and one data-processing problem 11/03: 3 rounds, back-to-back interviews 12/03: offer Background: Statistics PhD, resume roughly 80% LLM-related research, no conference publications at the time of the interview (a few projects were finished and submitted), no industry experience. Round 1: the interviewer was a senior guy. 30 minutes of behavior…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Principal Applied Scientist Interview Experience — Virtual Onsite, Then the Req Was Cancelled
This was a team under Microsoft MAI working on a web data platform, not the superintelligence team. The role was Principal Applied Scientist. The phone screen was mostly ML fundamentals and my background. They focused on data-related questions, and there were a few design questions too. Virtual onsite: What HR listed for each round did not quite match the actual interviews. Basically every round…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Product Manager recruiter screen, hiring manager, and big-data silence
After I applied, I was contacted for an initial screen. The recruiter part felt a little unstructured but not off-putting, more conversational than scripted. I was told that multiple candidates were being interviewed for the role, which made the process feel uphill from the start. I reached a hiring-manager round and focused mostly on big-data topics. Additional rounds were supposed to follow, bu…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — 25 Minutes to Hand-Code a Concurrent Task Executor
I applied pretty randomly online, and HR reached out to schedule an interview for yesterday afternoon. I went in with a "just watching the show" mindset, and honestly the whole experience was terrible — basically a setup for failure. If I'd actually been seriously job hunting, this would have driven me insane. First, it was a one-hour technical phone screen, and half an hour of that went into goi…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Level 64 Offer That Still Fell Short
I've always just been a lurker here, never able to see anything useful. Since I'm interviewing right now, I figured I'd post this — hopefully it helps others too. Background: I work at Amazon (aka "the banana factory"), YOE 6+. WA. Let me give the result up front: I applied as senior and got a level 64 offer. After two rounds of negotiation, total comp went from 26 to 30 (215 base + 54/2 sign-on…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Screen and Four Hiring-Event Rounds
The report describes a senior software engineering interview for Microsoft’s Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud organization. A technical screen in late August preceded a four-round hiring event in mid-September. The screen combined a three-number sum problem with a question about resolving disagreement. The first event round examined a thread-safe executor that preserves task orde…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Language Expectations and Stateful Naming
The author describes a Microsoft senior-engineering phone screen followed by three virtual-onsite rounds. The screen required a production-quality integer parser supporting arbitrary bases. The applicant advanced despite overlooking negative numbers. Subsequent sessions covered reconstructing digits from word representations, converting hexadecimal input to an IPv4 address, discussing a dictionar…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Senior+ Data Scientist Interview Experience — AI-Assisted ML Round, Rejected on Level Calibration
Background: about 4 years of YOE, full-stack DS at a startup. Timeline: Cold apply → recruiter reach out: 9 weeks Reach out → phone screen: 3 weeks Phone screen → onsite: 4 weeks (got the notice in the third week) Onsite → result: 5 weeks (I heard some people waited even longer) I'd long heard that Microsoft interviews move slowly, and now I've experienced it myself. Phone screen: resume walkthro…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Software Engineer interview: correct solutions that still timed out
My technical rounds were mostly classic DSA questions, but efficiency mattered most. I could tell they were judging more than whether my logic worked. My approach also had to be optimized enough to pass the last few tests. Time limits were part of the challenge, and if I wrote something too slow, the end of the test suite failed. The process stayed focused on performance. The stressful part was n…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Software Engineer interview: dynamic programming and scheduling algorithms
This was an on-campus process with two rounds on the same schedule. First I got a simple dynamic-programming question about counting ways to reach a target count. The second round shifted to scheduling algorithms: FCFS, SJF, and round-robin. They were not presented as trick questions. I felt reasonably comfortable with both the DP logic and the scheduler implementations. I did not get an offer. M…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Software Engineer Interview Experience — A 90-Minute OA and Only Time for Brute Force
The latest OA: 90 minutes, two questions, with AI hints for the second question. I only managed to write a brute-force solution for the second one. It probably needed DP, but I ran out of time. 2571 You are given an integer array requiredSum of length n. Build an array result of length n that satisfies all of these conditions: result is non-decreasing: result[i] ≤ result[i + 1] for every valid i.…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Software Engineer Interview Experience: A demanding opening test
Before I could speak with a recruiter, I had to clear a technical test. It was challenging enough to feel like a real filter and about what I expected from Microsoft. Once I passed that hurdle, the rest of the process moved forward, but I did not receive an offer. The test set the tone immediately, and the bar felt consistent with Microsoft's reputation. My main takeaway was that proving I could…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Software Engineer Interview Experience: Binary search first, then graph problems
I had an online assessment first, followed by two live coding interviews. The experience was pretty middle-of-the-road for me: not relaxed, but not chaotic either. The first coding interview had a medium LeetCode-style binary-search problem, while the second shifted to graphs. I also discussed general software-development principles and problem-solving. The interviewers were professional and easy…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience
I took a LeetCode-style test with three problems, then went through three interviews with different managers. Each manager interview ran for about an hour and combined a coding problem with behavioral questions. The format made it clear they were weighing both problem solving and how I described my thinking and experience. The test came first, and each manager conversation added a human layer tha…
Interview experiences · Microsoft
Microsoft Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four Rounds, Best Vibe I Had All Year
Four rounds, overall a really relaxed vibe. Posting my Microsoft interview experience to give back to the forum. Bottom line up front: this was the most comfortable-feeling interview I had all year. The interviewers were pretty much all friendly, nobody tried to trip me up on purpose, and when I got stuck they'd proactively throw me a rope. The questions were medium difficulty, but they cared a l…