I had an in-person, 30-minute screen, followed by an invitation to onsite interviews in Cambridge. The onsite interviews rotated each of us through four different one-on-one sessions over the course of half a day.

Each interview was with either a software engineer from various teams within Microsoft or the director of the program itself.

They were not allowed to tell us what we were interviewing for until the day of the interviews. I found this frustrating, as I had applied for a couple of different positions within Microsoft and didn't know which one to prepare for.

However, upon arrival, we were told it was for a Software Engineer position in the AI Rotational Program.

Each of the 45-minute interviews included a mix of technical and behavioral questions. I heard from others there at the same time that some had three technical and one behavioral interview, with little cross-over.

Either way, be prepared for both!

I heard back with results less than two weeks later. I then had about a week (pre-extension, two weeks when I asked for more time) to decide whether to accept the offer.

[Behavioral] What was some critical feedback you received from a teammate? How did you respond to it?

[Behavioral] What has been your most difficult teaming experience? How did you resolve it?

[Technical]

1. What is a binary tree?
2. What is a binary search tree?
3. Write an algorithm to find and return the node in a binary search tree with the nearest value larger than the input value. (So, if the tree had nodes with values 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7, and the input value were 4, return the node with the value of 5.)

[Technical] Given a sequence of integers as inputs (e.g., someone's weight measured over time), determine the largest weight loss the person experienced. (E.g., [135, 150, 170, 165, 140, 145, 160, 175] --> 170-140 --> 30.)

[Technical] Given 3 (x,y) points forming a triangle, how would you determine (mathematically) if a 4th (x,y) point was within the triangle or not? (Note: This question was specifically geared to judge problem-solving with a difficult problem, not knowledge of geometry, and the interviewer worked with me a lot because of that.)