Microsoft Interview Experience || SDE-2 || Hyderabad || Offer

I recently interviewed for an SDE-2 position at Microsoft in Hyderabad, and I'm thrilled to share that I received an offer! My interview process involved four distinct rounds, each testing a different facet of my engineering skills.

📌 Round 1: System Design & LLD

This round began with a system design challenge where I discussed designing a large-scale distributed network setup, focusing on latency and cost constraints. I presented a high-level architecture diagram and explained my approach to the deployment pipeline. Following this, for the Low-Level Design (LLD) portion, I was tasked with implementing a subscription-based notification service. This service needed to allow clients to register for timed callbacks, and we delved into discussions around concurrency, object design, and various edge cases.

📌 Round 2: Operating Systems & Concurrency

The second round primarily focused on Operating Systems concepts and concurrency. I discussed the differences between threading and processes, various scheduling algorithms, memory management techniques, and synchronization mechanisms. Specific topics included race conditions, deadlocks, and the practical usage of semaphores. Towards the end of this round, I was given a moderate-to-hard DSA problem related to permutations and order generation, which I solved.

📌 Round 3: System Design & DSA

The third round was a mix of system design and Data Structures & Algorithms. For system design, I designed a strategy-based board game, emphasizing an object-oriented approach. We covered game mechanics, data storage considerations, and how to handle real-time interactions. I also encountered a stack-based DSA problem where we discussed overflow and underflow scenarios with real-world examples. Additionally, I was presented with the classic "Missing & Repeating Number Problem," and I focused on optimizing my approach for efficient space and time complexity.

📌 Round 4: Hiring Manager Discussion

The final round was with a hiring manager. We started with a deep dive into the architecture of a complex backend system I had previously worked on, discussing scalability, my tech stack choices, and various optimizations I implemented. We also discussed thread pools and task scheduling extensively. A significant part of this round involved implementing a basic scheduler from scratch, without relying on built-in libraries, which was a practical test of my understanding.