Microsoft L61 || Interview Process

I cleared the Online Assessment (conducted on HackerRank), which included one medium and one hard-level question focused on dynamic programming and bit masking.

Round 1 – System Design + Project Deep Dive This round began with an in-depth discussion of one of my projects. The design question was: “Given multiple 1GB machines and a 1PB file, how would you store, retrieve, and scale this design?” I approached it using sharding, replication, and consistent hashing, and we had several follow-up discussions exploring trade-offs and design decisions.

Round 2 – DSA + Functional Coding This was a data structures and algorithms round. The core question involved processing a stream of numbers and implementing a set of APIs — one of which required returning the sum of the first n smallest numbers in O(1) time. I wrote fully functional code and walked the interviewer through various corner cases and optimizations.

Round 3 – Multithreading + Project Discussion We again started with a detailed project discussion, followed by questions on multithreading. I was asked to solve the classic producer-consumer problem, which was extended to multiple producers and consumers. I provided a solution using std::unique_lock, std::mutex, and std::condition_variable, and explained the synchronization logic thoroughly.

Round 4 – Technical + Managerial + Behavioral This round combined technical and managerial aspects. We discussed my resume, followed by a technical conversation around C++ concepts such as thread_local. There was also a tree traversal DSA question with follow-up variations. The round concluded with a few behavioral questions to assess team fit and communication.

I’m currently waiting for the final verdict.