Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

Share yours, earn XP

72 stories

Likes earn the author +10 XP for the first 3 likes each day

MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSenior+
Reported Apr 2026

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 s…

OfferOnsite0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Four Rounds, Best Vibe I Had All Year

Four rounds, overall a really relaxed vibe. Posting my Microsoft interview experience to give back to the forum. Bottom line up front: this was the most comfortable-feeling interview I had all year. The interviewers were pretty much all friendly, nobody tried to trip me up on purpose, and when I got stuck they'd proactively throw me a rope. The questions were medium difficulty, but they cared a l…

Onsite0
MicrosoftMachine Learning Engineer
Reported Apr 2026

Cold Applied from Finance, Extra System Design Round Led to an Offer

I come from finance and wanted to move into AI and LLM work. For a few months I took on projects with early-stage startups, building RAG systems and AI-native products on the side. I want to stress one thing, because I didn't really believe it myself before: you can switch fields even in the middle of a career, with no big tech background. I had no referral either and just applied cold. What got…

OfferOnsite0
MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSenior+
Reported Apr 2026

Painter's Partition Screen, Same-Day Two-Round Loop, Then the AA Round

I applied for a Senior Software Engineer opening through the careers portal. About a week later a recruiter phoned to set up a technical screen, and the screen itself took place a week after that. This was my first ever Microsoft interview, so I was thrilled and nervous in equal measure. Technical Screen round The screen was a single coding problem, labelled LeetCode easy. I didn't recognize it a…

Onsite0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Reported Apr 2026

LLD in the Screening Round, Top-K Design in the Behavioral Round, Offer

Update: I got an offer for a Microsoft L61 role after about 5 months of prepping and interviewing. My background is in trading platforms. I built strategies for traders and also did some infra work where latency mattered a lot. I wanted to move to big tech to work on products at scale, to have a stronger name on my resume, and of course for the better pay :) For prep I did the usual. LeetCode for…

OfferOnsite0
MicrosoftMachine Learning Engineer
Apr 2026

Technical Screen Ended Early After a Broken HackerRank Link

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
MicrosoftMachine Learning Engineer
Mar 2026

A Cold 45-Minute Screen for the Excel Copilot Team, Then a Same-Day Rejection

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
Microsoft
Mar 2026

DNA Reassembly, Then an Euler Path Follow-up

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

A Three-Round Phone Screen (Largest Island, Count Clouds, Find the Influencer), Then ChatGPT System Design

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

Technical ScreenXP0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Online Assessment with a Balanced-Window and Monotonic-Stack Problem

Q1 — problem You're given a permutation p of length n. For each k (1 ≤ k ≤ n), determine whether there's a contiguous subarray that is exactly a permutation of the numbers 1 through k (order doesn't matter). If one exists, call k "balanced." The final output is a length-n binary string, where the k-th digit says whether k is balanced. Q1 — approach The key isn't to enumerate subarrays — it's to f…

Online Assessment0
MicrosoftData Scientist
Feb 2026

Three Back-to-Back Interviews After the OA

The OA was an hour long with two questions, pretty simple. Three days after that I got an interview invite. Three interviews back to back, three hours total, all with very senior people interviewing. The first interviewer worked on software/systems and had me write a problem, roughly medium difficulty. Org chart → Tree. Top-down, level by level → BFS. "Show the entire layer first" → Queue. The se…

OfferOnsite0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

A Full-Day HE With a Matrix-Move Puzzle and Two Design Rounds

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

OnsiteXP0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

A Four-Round Onsite That Felt Like a Formality

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

OnsiteXP0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Failed on an Unfamiliar Coding Problem

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedOnsiteXP0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Onsite, Then the HM Round No-Showed

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

No responseOnsiteXP0
MicrosoftData ScientistIntern
Feb 2026

Three Back-to-Back Rounds After the OA

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

OfferOnsiteXP0
MicrosoftApplied ScientistIntern
Feb 2026

Three Back-to-Back Virtual Onsites in One Day

Position: Applied Science: PhD Internship Opportunities - Redmond HR emailed to invite me to interview, no OA. VO1 (02/04): a 30 minute simple chat, talked about past projects, asked about some details. Then scheduled three back-to-back VOs on the same day (02/19), each 45 minutes, with a 15 minute break between adjacent interviews. VO2: an applied scientist, also asked about technical details of…

OfferOnsite0
MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerIntern
Feb 2026

Research Intern Video Screen That Was Pure LeetCode

Background: currently a student at CMU. Process: I applied online through a mass application, and about two weeks later I got an interview invitation. It was a video interview. What the interview was like: the interviewer was an MLE on the team who had been working for a few years. He was really nice and gave me quite a few hints along the way. Even though this was a research intern role, the int…

Technical Screen0
MicrosoftApplied ScientistSenior+
Feb 2026

Fumbled Diffusion, Wrong on Min-Heap, Rejected

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Azure Resource Team, Four-Round Virtual Onsite

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

OnsiteXP0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

Share your experience to earn XP