I applied through university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA)
Interview
I initially had a on campus interview at my university. It was short 30 minute interview where they went over my resume and had a quick technical question.
I heard back around 3 weeks later, mainly b/c I had a offer that was on the verge of expiring. They flew me out to the Redmond campus that same week.
The day of the interview, I arrived on site around 8am and had a quick chat with HR. They told me which team I was interviewing for and sent me to the building for the interviews. I had 5 interviews and 1 lunch interview. This lasted until around 3PM.
I received a call the next day and was extended an offer.
The technical questions asked:
On-campus interview:
remove duplicates from an unsorted array
On-site interviews:
implement strtok
reverse string(ie. hello world => world hello)
find lca for bst
find first non repeating character in string
given a list of characters and the function toLower, implement toUpper
check for palindrome in string and singly linked list
check if binary tree is bst
It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of meeting time intervals, determine if a person could attend all meetings.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2024
Interview
I was invited to a technical interview with Microsoft. The interviewer started with a general question: “What happens when you type google.com into your browser?” They asked a few follow-up questions related to that.
After that, they gave me a LeetCode algorithmic question, which was at a hard level. The problem was “Integer to English Words.”
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. What happens when you type google.com into your browser?
2. “Integer to English Words” – LeetCode algorithmic question
Three tech interviews + one hiring manager VO, most of questions are medium to hard leetcode questions. Ask some questions about techniques you written on the resume. But I think they care more about the match of the research and the job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about the recommendation System you made for the work.
