Microsoft | SDE 2 (L61)| Hyderabad

Current role: Mid Senior Role in FAANG
Education: Btech from Tier3
Experience : 5 years

Recently, I interviewed with Microsoft for SDE2 position and received an offer.
There were total of 5 rounds. 1st round was OA, then 1 DSA round post that two LLD rounds and lastly managaerial round.

I was reached out by a recruiter through Naukri in June last week. I expressed my interest for the interviews.

Online Assessment: Received an OA link after 2-3 days and recruiter suggested to take it within 3-4 days. There were two coding questions which had to be done within 90 min. I can't recall exact questions but 1st was related to prefix array and was easy. 2nd question was based on easy-medium 2D DP. Completed it within 45 min , all test cases passed.

I got an update after few days from recruiter that i have cleared OA but received update about further rounds after ~3 weeks where it was informed that there will be total 4 rounds - 1. DSA 2. LLD 3. HLD 4. Managerial on same day.

DSA Round : Interviewer started with a easy String question , where she was just intersted in my approach. Post that, i was asked to provide approach and code the solution for https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repeating-characters/description/ . Code provided the expected output for various test cases that we discussed during interview. Second question was based on https://leetcode.com/problems/lru-cache/ . We also discussed how request and response can be modelled as per LRU Cache solution. We discussed time and space complexities as well.

LLD Round 1: I was asked to do low level design for Parking Lot. We came up with the scope of problem, defined requirements to focus and also some extended requirements if time permitted. Came up with entities that i could think of to define teh overall model. Interviewer asked to implement the model(class/interface/functions). I was not asked to code all the functionalities rather important ones like how do we find the optimal parking slot for a given vehicle etc.

Feedback was to include more real life scenarios and focus on validations as well.

LLD Round 2: It was spposed to be HLD round but interviewer asked to do low level design for Online Book Reader System like Kindle. Followed the same approach as that of previous round - defined requirements, asked questions about scope and expectation, took a learning from previous round and defined another section for assumptions as well.
Here, also i was asked to code important functionalities.
later, interviewer modified the question to modify the existing design to handle multiple sources for books instead of single one (like Aggregator System). I proposed the modifiations, was asked to code those changes. No major callouts from interviewer.

Managerial Round: It started with introduction and behavioral questions like why do i want to switch ? Why Microsoft ? What are my expectations ? Some deep dive on my current project and team.
Then, I was asked to code a Linked List question where given a linked list and two values m & n , we had to retain first m nodes and delete next n nodes until we reach the end. We discussed various test cases required for this problem.
Later, I was asked HLD for a problem similar to Top K Visited/Frequent for last 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week given an input stream. Interviewer was just interested in knowing my approach, how i arrive at solution , various options available and how to build it for distributed system.

Received confirmation about selection in subsequent week.

Few Points :

All interviewers were very polite and helpful.
Had done 1-2 silly mistakes in code but upon highlighting, corrected it.
In LLD/HLD, highlight assumptions very clearly.
I was thinking out loud during all rounds and provided relavant comments, used proper variable naming in code.

Offer Details : TBD