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 + 270/4 stock + up to 30% bonus). I don't think it's going to move any higher. It's still below what I was hoping for, so I probably won't accept it and will keep interviewing elsewhere.

Process: First there was a screen with the hiring manager, not much to say about it — mostly just getting to know each other's background and what we each work on (somehow the HM asked a lot of detailed questions about our product, which gave me the feeling they were trying to fish information out of me, though maybe I'm just being paranoid). We talked on a Friday and by Monday they said I could schedule the formal loop.

The loop had 4 rounds. Round one was with a PE, starting with a knowledge check that asked about all sorts of edge cases around hashmaps, then moved into designing a distributed system with multiple replicas for replicating key-value pairs. Time was limited, so the focus was mainly on replication, quorum, and handling failed nodes, that kind of thing. That said, it still felt pretty high-level overall. The interviewer was very nice though.

Round two was with the skip-level manager... this one was even more watered down, basically just a chat. The two questions that stuck with me were: how would you approach solving a performance problem in a distributed system, and to talk about a recent innovation I'd been involved in.

Round three was another SD (system design) round. The interviewer was a senior SDE, and the task was to design a distributed system that could collect telemetry from millions of devices and support both real-time and batch data analysis.

Round four was, from what I could tell, a manager from a neighboring team, and it was SD plus coding (I'm guessing they noticed none of the earlier rounds had involved any actual coding). The task was to design a core component of a streaming system — processing logs coming in from several upstream services, filtering out the error logs, and at the same time keeping a real-time count of errors per service plus a moving average with alarming, basically a sliding-window implementation.

That's the whole interview experience — honestly a bit atypical. I got the feeling they interviewed me like I was some kind of big shot, but the money just couldn't hit that level, so I guess level 64 is what it is. I asked if they could bump it to 65 and they said they'd need to re-interview me for that, so I figured, never mind. Overall though, I felt like Microsoft's interviewers were all pretty friendly. But I do have to complain about the recruiter — extremely unprofessional and inefficient. I sent over my availability, gave them three days the following week, and then a week went by with no response. I emailed to check in, and they called me while I was at work to ask if I could interview the next day... come on, don't I have meetings booked in advance? I got a bit annoyed and let them have it, and the recruiter kept apologizing. I gave them three more days and that's when we finally got it scheduled. Also, I explicitly said it wasn't convenient for me to take calls at work and that I preferred email, but they kept calling every time something came up anyway. Unbelievable.