Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Declined Downlevel Offer | Australia

Round 1: Face to face interview (DSA + behaviour)

Course schedule (topological sort) - completed within 20 mins
The rest was just chit chat about my current role

Round 2: Face to face interview (System design + coding)

Design Elastic search given that i dont know lucene index in details. How do i scale and guarantee fault tolerence?
Follow up, how to search for words that are the most important in the data stream. I clarify how does he define importance. In the end, he said most frequent used word. So I propose short way with count min fetch and long way with Map Reduce or Flink to do aggregation. Also, i deep dived into duplicates prevention with Kafka transaction and Flink
Follow up, some words like 'I' , 'am', 'he', 'she' are common but might not be important. How do i handle that? I have no idea how to answer it besides having a offline generated list of words to skip in data pipeline. Also, mention word meaning are different from context

Last 10mins, coding question on Interval. Similar to Merge Interval problem
Given list of meetings with start and end time, find conflict meetings
Follow up, find the most meeting can be scheduled
Unable to completed the follow up due to time constraints but the idea i mentioned is correct and hes happy with it

Round 3: DSA + API Design + Design pattern behaviour

Start off with API design
My achievement
Last 30 mins, LRU cache - solve it in 20 mins
Last 10 mins, Singleton implemention with thread safety

Round 4: Hiring manager

Behaviour for 40 mins
Coding for 10mins : move 0 in array to the top of array without changing order of non-zero numbers in it (similar to dutch sorting algo). Due to little time, i gave him O(n^2) solution

All of these 4 rounds require passing previous last round.

Got a call from recruiter the next day saying that the team will not hire senior role anymore across Australia. WTF, why wasting my time?. So they offer me SDE2 . I turned them down and request if i can interview with other team in Azure