Microsoft Software Engineer (SWE) Interview Guide

TL;DR, the Microsoft SWE interview loop looks like this:

Step 1: Recruiter screen

Step 2: Online assessment (Codility or HackerRank) and/or technical phone screen

Step 3: The onsite loop - 3 to 6+ rounds

3.1 Coding round(s)

3.2 Low-level design (LLD/OOD)

3.3 System design

3.4 Project deep dive

3.5 Behavioral (interwoven in other rounds and possible separate interview)

Step 4: AA (As Appropriate) round

Teams at Microsoft can change the structure, add more rounds that test the same thing, focus on different aspects, basically they have total freedom to figure out the kind of teammate they want.

Some candidates have gone through two OAs (online assessments), and multiple design rounds.

The level you’re going for will change the process as well. At higher levels you’ll be expected to define and write specs and docs without guidance. At lower levels the focus is on your ability to implement. 

Usually junior levels will go through interview loops focused more on coding and OOD. Senior loops (L63+) will feature more on design depth and scoping. At Microsoft it’s common for candidates to receive down-leveled offers as well, but on the flip side if your interview performance was really strong, you can ask for a level up.

Expect a standard fit-and-story check with your recruiter. They’ll go over the basics like your background, logistics, motivation, and figure out which openings match your profile. 

Sometimes Microsoft recruiters can ask small puzzles or basic CS questions as well.

• Why Microsoft? What’s your favorite product at Microsoft and why?
• What are you passionate about in tech?
• There are 3 identical on-off switches. One of them controls the lamp in the attic. You have to figure out which one. You can manipulate the switches as many times as you like, but you are allowed only one trip to the attic. How do you do it?
• What is your favorite programming language?

The Microsoft OA is usually on Codility (some teams use HackerRank). You’ll be given two to three problems and will have anywhere between 60 to 90 mins to solve them. 

For certain roles, the OA will be replaced or supplemented by a technical screening with a senior SWE or the hiring manager. The topics will likely be the same, but they’re also evaluating how you work and communicate. 

Most candidates have reported LeetCode mediums, and some can be hard depending on the team as well. The most common topics are arrays, strings, matrices, hashsets, and trees.

These questions have been reported by Microsoft SWE candidates:

• Explain recursion to a 5-year-old in 90 seconds.
• Given an m x n matrix, return all elements of the matrix in spiral order.
• Given an m x n 2D binary grid which represents a map of '1's (land) and '0's (water), return the number of islands.
• Given an unsorted array of integers nums, return the length of the longest consecutive elements sequence. You must write an algorithm that runs in O(n) time.

“Explain [X] to a 5-year-old” is a super common question at MS. Interviewers want to see if you can communicate complex technical items and ideas to a non-technical audience. Depending on the question, a full answer can also mean giving them a reason to care. If it’s a technical thing, what's the business connection?

A senior coach on Prepfully who used to be a Principal Engineer at Microsoft says:

The Microsoft onsite has three to six rounds each 45 to 60 minutes. Nowadays, the onsite loop is usually virtual, but an actual onsite can also be an option. 

Remember each round isn’t fresh, if you think you could have done better on one aspect, expect the next interviewer to focus on that. 

Microsoft says it assesses fundamental knowledge, capability, and learning potential. So it’s not just about what you already know, but also how you respond when you don’t know something. Satya Nadella’s words “the learn-it-all will always do better than the know-it-all” show what interviewers are looking for. 

When recording their feedback, interviewers are also writing down the questions you ask as well. They want to see you clarify and take the time to understand the problem before you start jumping into it.

Expect two coding rounds. You could have distinct rounds, one of which will be ‘manual’ coding and the other will be AI-assisted coding. Or you could be asked to do both in the same round. This Reddit user broke down how the AI-coding interview went for them and what was asked. The Microsoft interviewer encouraged the candidate to use VS code with the Claude plugin to avoid switching between applications. As this user noted, you could be allowed to use any tool of your choice.

Microsoft interviewers can also kick off with some behavioral and experience questions for 10 mins before getting to the actual code part.

Microsoft SWE candidates have reported these questions:

• Given an array arr[] of non-negative integers, where each element arr[i] represents the height of the vertical lines, find the maximum amount of water that can be contained between any two lines, together with the x-axis.
• Given inorder and preorder traversals of a Binary Tree in array inorder[] and preorder[] respectively, Construct the Binary Tree and return its root.
• Design a data structure that follows the constraints of an LRU cache.
• Convert a non-negative integer num to its English word representation.

Microsoft interviewers will give you hints at junior levels, so the expectation is to work through the problem together and come to a solution.

They focus on how well you handle edge cases, how clean and organized your code is, how fast you solved it, and if your solution is optimal. The number of questions you solve is also important. Usually you will get two coding questions, and if you can solve more you get brownie points.

We suggest you talk about how you’d brute force it before going for the optimal solution and be sure to test your own solution as well.

Some teams at Microsoft will also have an LLD round. You’ll be given an ambiguous problem and you have to define the classes and interfaces and also implement a part of it.

These questions have been reported by Microsoft SWE candidates:

• Design a parking lot.
• Design a rate limiter.
• Design a job scheduler.
• Cache a property at class level in Python.
• Reverse engineer these C++ function headers.

Before you start, be sure to ask a lot of clarifying questions even if you know the solution stat. This is partly because interviewers are also evaluating the questions you ask and how you clarify requirements.

We suggest you ask your interviewer if the architecture will remain high-level or you will have to code something as different interviewers will have different expectations.

If you have a few years of experience, the system design round carries the most weight for Microsoft.

Basically what system are you designing and why, how are components going to interact with one another? What is the flow? What trade-offs are you making and why those? How will you handle scale? What are the main bottlenecks?

Microsoft SWE candidates have reported these questions:

• Design Microsoft Teams.
• Design Netflix.
• Design a JSON-driven system that allows frontend to run a full decision tree without backend calls.
• Design a configuration management service and implement a small component.

The questions will be domain-dependent so try and find out whatever it is the team works on in detail from your recruiter. Our coaches also suggest you come up with constraints and discuss the assumptions you’re making with your interviewers.

Interviewers will ask follow up questions about the components you’ve picked and the overall flow. 

We have heard from our coaches that many interviewers pick the database. As this coach who is a Staff SWE at Apple and used to be a Principal SDE at Microsoft says:

For this round, interviewers will pick a project or system you’ve worked on and drill down. They expect you to understand every component and be able to talk about the decisions that went into it in detail.

Microsoft interviewers will also ask hypothetical questions based on your work.

Microsoft SWE candidates could be asked these questions:

• What was the DFS project intended to solve?
• What performance optimization did you do?
• Where did you store Docker images and how did you pull them?
• Which project are you most proud of?
• Why did you pick this randomization unit?

Pro-tip: Use the 3 second rule. If your interviewers will have to think about your sentence for more than 3 seconds, simplify it or reduce the jargon.

At Microsoft, the behavioral evaluation can happen throughout the loop, and that includes the coding and system design conversations. There could also be a distinct behavioral round that focuses on their cultural attributes.

You could be asked these questions:

• Tell me about a time when a big decision you made ended up being wrong.
• Can you tell me about a time where something unexpected happened, from outside of a technical standpoint that you had to deal with?
• How do you navigate differences in opinions?
• Can you tell me about a challenging piece of feedback you have received?

To have an anecdote for every type of scenario or follow up, we suggest that you make a story bank. Take the classic STAR framework and build it out into STAR+ (Situation, Task, Action, Result + the X-Factor: Learning) to structure your stories. The X-Factor at the end - Learning - is your definitive chance to demonstrate intellectual humility, and helps you reflect on a personal takeaway on how that situation changed you for the better.

For certain questions you will need full stories, and for others smaller snippets might suffice. Keep handy 3-4 key data points for each project, about the latency you reduced or downstream teams involved, for instance.

CTO Kevin Scott says “Part of the job of being an engineer is giving yourself permission and time to always be learning something new.” And that’s a quality Microsoft really values.

That’s why we suggest you focus more on the Learning step from STAR+ above. Usually it’s best to go with newer stories so you remember the details, but for failure stories you can pick ones that are older. With older stories you can point to what you did after the mistake, what you learned, then connect to what you did to improve and how you (as of right now) are better because of it. Or, how that’s a part of your current process.

Once your onsite is over with, an HM or a senior leader from another team will likely do a final interview. If you’re interviewing for a senior role, your interviewer could be a senior director. This round used to be called the As Appropriate round, and is still informally referred to as the AA. This additional round can happen right after the onsite or a week or two after the loop.

Basically, the final interviewers are asking themselves if you will work well with the rest of the team, and if you’re going for a leadership position, if you can lead and mentor others at Microsoft. 

These final Microsoft interviewers can be similar to Amazon's Bar Raiser and might ask similar types of questions. Your interviewer can choose to ask anything they want, and will have read all previous feedback, so AA interviewers decide where to focus on based on it.

The questions they ask will depend on your background and interview performance; expect something like:

• How do you use AI tools in your daily workflow?
• Have you ever had to disagree with something the senior leadership wanted? How did you handle it?
• Do you think you have a superpower?

After each round is over, Microsoft interviewers will write down feedback so all interviewers can read it in the final debrief. Because interview feedback may be shared across the loop, treat every round as connected: recover quickly from mistakes you've made. AA interviewers can have access to this feedback file before their interview round, and they tend to test candidates on weaker spots.

After this round is over with, there is a debrief among all the interviewers. Microsoft interviewers could be looking to see if you realize any missteps you might have made, and take steps to improve even in between rounds. If your interview performance was really strong, you might even be able to push for a senior role.

According to data from levels.fyi, total comp for Microsoft SWEs ranges from $170K at L59 (base $129K) to $590K (base $267K) at L67. Partners and distinguished engineers can pull in north of $1M.