Microsoft SDE Intern Interview Experience
💼 LTIMindtree Interview Experience (On-Campus) | Fresher | 2026
Salesforce SMTS | Interview Experience | Rejected
JPMC | SDE2 (Associate) - Java Backend - Interview Experience + Compensation
Microsoft - SDE2 - Coding Round
Target Engineer L4 Interview Experience - Offline
Summary
I interviewed for an Engineer L4 position at Target, which involved three in-person rounds. The interviews covered DSA, Java Streams, system design, and behavioral questions. While the initial rounds went well, I struggled with deep technical questions, particularly in the hiring manager round concerning Java, Spring Boot, JPA, and a Java Streams problem. Despite a positive experience with the interviewers, I received a rejection the following day.
Full Experience
All the interviews took place in their office in one day. Each interview panel was of 2 people.
1st Round:
- Questions on resume
- The project that I am currently working on in curr company
- Some questions on how would I handle certain scenarios such as bottlenecks
- DSA problem: Product of array except self(Brute->Optimal), was asked to handle edge cases and where would my code fail(-ve TC)
- Questions on Java Streams, Given an integer array, separate odd and even elements using a single stream.
The round went very well.
2nd Round:
- Started with asking: "Give any two scenarios where you did something and you were very proud of"
- Then went on to project discussion
- Why Redis and not in-memory K,V storage?
- A detailed discussion on Kafka and MQ in general
- Then I was asked which DS will I use to solve -> Find the nearest driver when a request comes when someone books a ride in Uber/Lyft.
- Again, detailed discussion around the project that I was working on in the company.
- Java Streams + Lambda discussion.
This round also went well.
3rd Round(HM):
- This was taken by Director + Senior EM
- Started with introduction
- Detailed discussion on the current project
- Was asked the Java version + Framework that I work in, and was asked to code something which I code in my company. (this is where I fumbled).
- Then their questions revolved around Java+SpringBoot+JPA, and they empasized on writing the code on pen and paper.
- Then a question which was expected to be solved by Java Streams, which I also bombed.
- Then they asked 2 sum problem, I went on from Brute force -> Sorting -> Optimal using HashMaps to which they said there might be millions of data and was asked not to use HashMap to which I said Sorting one was the most optimal.
- Then they asked why I wanted to switch etc etc for the last 2 mins.
I did not expect such in depth technical questions for HM round as well which I bombed and I knew this was the deal breaker for them, HR told it will be a general culture fit round and after a tiring day of offline interviews I felt like I could not have done any better.
I got rejection mail the next day, I really wanted to be a part of such a nice organization. All the people were so nice and warm throughout the interviews.
Hope this helps!
Interview Questions (7)
Given an integer array, return an array answer such that answer[i] is equal to the product of all the elements of nums except nums[i]. The problem required providing brute-force and optimal solutions, handling edge cases, and identifying where the code might fail with negative test cases.
Given an integer array, separate odd and even elements using a single Java Stream.
Describe any two scenarios where you accomplished something you were very proud of.
Discussion on why Redis would be chosen over a simple in-memory Key-Value storage.
Identify which data structure would be used to efficiently find the nearest driver when a ride request comes in a service like Uber or Lyft.
Given an array of integers and a target sum, find two numbers that add up to the target. The discussion involved brute force, sorting, and an optimal solution using HashMaps. A specific constraint was added for millions of data points where HashMaps were discouraged, leading to a discussion on the optimal approach without them (e.g., two-pointer on a sorted array).
Explain your reasons for wanting to switch jobs.