Microsoft | SDE2 | SEP 2020 | Hyderabad | OFFER !!!

My excitement was immense when I received an interview call from Microsoft, especially getting calls from both their Hyderabad and Bangalore offices. The virtual onsite interviews were conducted via Microsoft Teams and consisted of four rounds, each stretching to almost 1.5 hours. Most rounds followed a similar structure: approximately 10 minutes for behavioral questions, 30-40 minutes for coding and system design, and finally 5-10 minutes for me to ask questions to the interviewers.

Round 1: This round presented two problems. The first was a simple LeetCode Medium problem. The second required me to implement custom stack operations: push, pop, getMax, getMin, and popMid. The interviewer later twisted this problem into a more complex version, asking me to solve it within 5 minutes, which I believe was a deliberate attempt to gauge my composure under pressure. I nailed this round!

Round 2: This round featured a stack and queue-based question, followed by a tree traversal problem. Similar to the first round, the interviewer started with a base question and then built a series of follow-up questions based on my initial answers. I performed very well here too!

Round 3: This round had two interviewers, a Manager and a Principal Engineer. We spent a significant portion, about 30-40 minutes, deep-diving into my past projects. Following this, I was given a system design problem: to design the WhatsApp authentication service. This came with post-design questions focusing on key generation service, flow diagrams, timeout settings, and the data to be stored. I felt incredibly confident throughout this entire round and truly rocked it!

Round 4: This round was with a Senior Manager and a Director. It involved an intensive deep dive into performance tuning of 2-3 of my past projects, with detailed discussions on memory leaks, fragmentations, multithreading, and thread and resource management. Unfortunately, this round did not go as well as the others. There was also a system design question that was much more focused on thread processing.

By the end of the interviews, which spanned from 10 am to 7 pm, I was completely exhausted. I wasn't satisfied with my performance in the last interview, so I decided to take a break, learn from my mistakes, and prepare for my next interviews the following morning. Surprisingly, just an hour later, the recruiter called to inform me that the feedback was positive and I might hear back in a couple of days. Voila! A week later, we were discussing the numbers. This was my 10th interview in 2020. I ultimately had to stop my job hunting journey due to health reasons and decided to join Microsoft.