Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four-Month Loop, Hard OA, Senior Offer

I first tried to break into big tech back in 2022. I had no idea how hiring worked there and had never even heard of LeetCode, so it went about as badly as you'd expect. After two Google attempts and one at Amazon, I finally have a Senior offer from Microsoft, and honestly it feels great.

The 2022 tries (Google and Amazon) came before I knew anything. It was only in 2024 that I stopped, wrote a study plan and actually stuck to it, and that year I got another shot at Google and lost again. Even so, I could feel how far I had come, and I told myself I would keep pushing until it worked. If I have to pick one commitment above all others, it's consistency. Yes, it's a cliche, but it holds: a single problem every day for three months gets you much further than ten a day for nine days. So schedule it, reserve a daily block for studying and nothing else, and don't let it slip. I did study more as the interview dates got close, but after months of steady work the extra isn't big. The same goes for system design and for coding, so one source of curated problems covering both is enough to cover everything. I also worked through textbooks and university-style online courses (MIT OCW, Coursera, O'Reilly). They helped me tie together what I already knew, but you can get there without them.

The whole Microsoft process dragged on for roughly four months, though most of that was sitting around unsure whether I'd go forward, not actual interviewing. It began with a very hard online assessment on HackerRank, where I got 15 of the 30 test cases. The topics were re-rooting a graph, which was new to me, and disjoint sets. About two months later I was told I would advance, and by then I had already accepted that I was out. Next was a recruiter call that doubled as a light behavioral interview. It went well and felt relaxed. After that came three coding rounds one after another, which also brought in system design questions, but without drawing any real architecture diagrams. Those were on HackerRank as well, at LeetCode medium difficulty with tough follow-ups. The offer arrived a month after the loop, with really glowing feedback. The recruiter said I had performed at Staff level, but given my years of experience the offer would be Senior. Google still hadn't gotten back to me about reopening a loop, and Uber's process was moving along, but I chose Microsoft.

The thing that helped most, and honestly changed how I act in interviews, was walking the interviewer through a fixed framework. I always aimed for four stages: about 5 minutes of clarifying, 20 of working out the solution, 10 of coding and 10 of debugging. And I labeled each stage right inside the editor or doc with comments, so the interviewer could always tell where I was. I found this out through mock interviews with a friend who was also aiming at big tech. Those sessions were a huge help, and he landed at another big tech company too. My advice, summed up:

1. Do the old familiar thing: put in lots of practice, but spread it out evenly over time. That is how the material sticks and the recurring patterns in questions start to stand out.
2. You don't need a pile of material. Keep to the fundamentals: one curated set of questions and, if anything, the classic books (Systems Design Interview and Cracking the Coding Interview).
3. If you can, find other people in the same boat. It's good for your sanity, and you may meet mock interview partners.

Finally, keep going. Most people fail these interviews more often than they pass, and it takes a while to get the feel of how they work. The process is designed to avoid hiring false positives, and the cost is that many good candidates get rejected along the way. A rejection doesn't make you a bad engineer. It just means you haven't yet learned how to handle this format, so keep at it until it clicks.