PayPal - Senior Software Engineer Frontend Interview Experience
Microsoft SDE2 interview experience
PAYTM - ROUND 1 SDE Java Backend : 2-3 yrs
My Full Meta Interview Experience (Sept–Oct 2025) — Rejected
Senior Software Engineer - Frontend | Okta | Bangalore
Microsoft Interview experience for L61 | SSE | SDE2
Summary
I successfully navigated through 4 rounds for an SDE2 position at Microsoft, which included system design, algorithms, and a multithreading problem, ultimately leading to a job offer.
Full Experience
On November 7th, 2025, I participated in an interview drive for an SDE2 position at Microsoft. I had 4.5 years of experience at the time. The interview process consisted of four rounds, with three conducted on the first day and the fourth two days later.
Round 1
The first interviewer asked me to design a Photocache. This was essentially an LRU cache where the key was an SHA-256 encoded string representation of a photo, and the value was the original photo name. It was a straightforward string-to-string LRU Cache problem. I implemented the solution, and after running it with multiple test cases, I had to resolve some bugs.
Round 2
Round two began with an introduction and some project-related discussions. The interviewer then moved on to questions about distributed caches versus single-machine caches. He then asked me to design an LRU Cache, but since I had already covered that in the first round, I informed him. He acknowledged it and moved to a tree question: Reverse Odd Levels of Binary Tree. He mentioned that pseudocode would suffice, so I wrote out the code without running it. Although it wasn't the most optimized solution, he seemed content with my approach.
Round 3
In the third round, after introductions and discussing my projects, I was asked to design an online Snake and Ladder Game. I clarified if he wanted a High-Level Design (HLD) with diagrams or a Low-Level Design (LLD). He instructed me to start with the LLD, and then we would discuss HLD. I wrote a working code for the LLD, which he tested. Time ran out, and we didn't get to the HLD discussion.
Round 4 | AA Round
The fourth round, an 'AA' round, was with a very senior person, likely a Manager or Director. After introductions, I explained my current company's project, and we had a few counter-questions on it. Then, I was asked a Java question: to create a producer-consumer setup, which is a standard multithreading problem. My code was adequate; I used synchronized methods and initially didn't use wait() or notify(), but when he questioned it, I explained that I understood how to incorporate them. Following that, there were a few questions related to AI, which I didn't fully grasp, so I provided some generic answers. Finally, some behavioral questions were asked, such as 'Why Microsoft?' and 'Tell me three qualities of a good employee.'
Overall, this last round was just 'ok-ok' as my code wasn't fully optimized, but I felt very good about my performance in the first three rounds.
Interview Questions (4)
Design a Photocache, which is essentially an LRU cache where the key is an encoded representation of a photo (string → SHA-256) and the value is the original photo name. It should be a straightforward string-to-string LRU Cache. The solution needs to handle multiple test cases and be debugged.
Design an online Snake and Ladder Game. The interviewer requested a Low-Level Design (LLD) first, with a discussion of High-Level Design (HLD to follow).
Implement the standard Producer-Consumer problem using multithreading in Java.