Microsoft SDE II L61 Interview Experience
Summary
I went through three interview rounds for an SDE II position at Microsoft and was offered a hire.
Full Experience
I had applied to 50+ roles on the careers page and eventually received a HackerRank test link for one of them. After completing the test, I heard back after 1.5 months, I got a call from the interview scheduler to set up the rounds.
There were three rounds in total, scheduled over a span of 5 days.
Round 1 (DSA Problem Solving Coding): This round was heavily focused on coding.
The main problem revolved around designing a dictionary‑like system where words from different languages were stored and queried. The challenge was to support operations like:
- inserting words
- updating/removing words
- counting frequency of a word
- handling prefix‑based queries
I initially discussed multiple approaches (like hashmap‑based solutions), but eventually moved to a Trie‑based approach and had to implement it from scratch. The interviewer asked me to write different functions around it and also discuss edge cases.
A big part of the discussion was around handling tricky cases like:
- words with common prefixes
- variations in word endings
- multiple occurrences across different categories
At the end, I was also asked what kind of test cases I would write to validate the solution.
Round 2 (DSA + Behavioral): This round started with a deep dive into my past work.
One of my projects was discussed in detail — the interviewer kept asking “why” at every step (why a certain technology was used, why a design decision was made, why a specific component like caching was needed, etc.). It was more about understanding my thought process than just the outcome.
There were also some general questions like:
- Where I see myself in 3‑5 years down the line?
- How seniors/teammates would describe me?
- How would you describe engineering & social culture at your previous team?
- What would you like to improve in yourself based on feedback you received?
- What innovative ideas have you implemented in the team?
Towards the end, there was a short DSA question:
Given a string with different types of brackets, check if it is balanced. If not, determine the minimum number of reversals needed to make it balanced.
This involved discussing both stack‑based and optimized approaches.
Round 3 (DSA + Culture/Team Fit): This round was a mix of coding and discussion.
Two medium‑level DSA problems were asked. The focus wasn’t just on solving them, but also on how the solution would change if constraints or input conditions were modified.
There were also some general discussions around:
- why I’m looking for a change
- what kind of work I’m interested in
- expectations from the team
I also asked a few questions about the team and projects towards the end.
Overall, the process had a strong focus on fundamentals, clarity of thought, and being able to explain decisions in depth, especially around past work.
Got the final result after 10‑12 days. Verdict: Hire
Interview Questions (2)
Design a Multi‑language Dictionary with Prefix Queries
Design a dictionary‑like system that stores words from multiple languages and supports the following operations:
- Insert a word.
- Update or remove a word.
- Count the frequency of a given word.
- Perform prefix‑based queries to retrieve all words that share a common prefix. The solution should handle edge cases such as words with common prefixes, variations in word endings, and multiple occurrences across different categories. Discuss test cases to validate the implementation.
Balanced Brackets with Minimum Reversals
Given a string containing different types of brackets (e.g., ‘{’, ‘}’, ‘[’, ‘]’, ‘(’, ‘)’), determine whether the string is balanced. If it is not balanced, compute the minimum number of bracket reversals required to make the string balanced.