Interview Experiences

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

Share yours, earn XP

8 stories

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

MicrosoftMachine Learning Engineer
Oct 2026

UX Project Deep Dive and Eight Behavioral Stories

The second half of this VO was a project deep dive and Behavioral. You can grind the technical questions, but BQ comes down to breaking down your own experience in advance. In this post I'm sharing the questions I was asked, the structure of my answers, and a few takeaways from preparing my stories. Project deep dive: "How do you present a UX proposal?" The interviewer first gave me a hypothetica…

Onsite0
MicrosoftMachine Learning Engineer
Jul 2026

A Pizza Pricing Function and Microservice Follow-ups

I just finished a VO (virtual onsite). The question was to write a function that calculates a pizza price. Problem Write a function to calculate the price of a pizza: Rules: small $5, medium $10, large $15 every topping is a flat $2 if premium_crust=True, add $5 if size is invalid, return None toppings can be empty What I wrote A few points I thought were worth saying out loud first: I put the pr…

Technical Screen0
MicrosoftMachine Learning Engineer
Jun 2026

LeetCode Rounds Then a RAG System Design

Round 1 The first round was a classic array-processing problem: LeetCode 56 (Merge Intervals). Overall it wasn't too hard — mostly testing fundamentals. The core idea is to sort by interval start, then walk through and merge the overlapping ranges. What actually separates candidates is how "Pythonic" the code is and how you handle edge cases — things like sorting elegantly with a lambda, or handl…

Onsite0
MicrosoftMachine Learning Engineer
Apr 2026

Four Rounds on the Bing Team, No Offer

I applied to several MAI positions on the site, and then a Bing team doing image search got back to me and said they wanted to schedule an interview. First, let me complain about the HR — from the email address, it's clearly outsourced, and they never reply. For example, I asked what kind of interview this was, what it would cover, how many rounds — no idea at all. They'd only show up two or thre…

RejectedOnsite0
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
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
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

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