TL;DR: One phone interview, then moved to the final round featuring one behavioral interview and two behavioral/technical interviews.

I interviewed in February 2023 for the Applied Science position for MAIDAP at Microsoft.

I was first contacted for a phone screen about a month after applying online. The phone screen was 30 minutes long. I was asked to solve a coding problem involving computing terms inside a matrix using NumPy. Knowledge of Linear Algebra (e.g., L2-norms, vectors, matrices) was needed.

After passing the phone interview, I was scheduled for three interviews with folks at MAIDAP, about three weeks after the phone screen.

One interview was completely behavioral. I was asked questions about solving conflicts with coworkers and how I get acclimated to working with a new team.

The other two interviews were a mix of technical and behavioral. I was asked to go into depth on past machine learning projects and discuss things like the exact architecture used, why I chose that architecture, pros and cons of my decisions, and improvements to be made. (Make sure to know your projects inside and out, as some questions can be very theoretical and require deep knowledge of current ML techniques.) After the technical portion, there were a few standard behavioral questions, e.g., solving conflicts with coworkers.

The overall interview process was quick, relatively pain-free, and very satisfying. The interviewers were very friendly, and it felt more like a conversation than a stressful interview.

Best of luck to you!

Name a time where you disagreed with a coworker, and how did you solve the issue?