I interviewed with Microsoft in January 2022. The interview process involved four rounds after an initial Codility coding assessment.

The first interview was a 45-minute coding session on Codility, requiring the solution of two problems.

The second interview focused on the Low-Level Design of a Vending Machine, also conducted on Codility.

The third interview was for algorithm design.

I was promised four rounds of interviews, but the fourth round was not conducted. I was notified of this cancellation in the evening.

The waiting time between rounds was directly proportional to the round number.

In the first round, one problem was based on Binary Search Trees, and the other involved parallel search for a substring in a very long string. The interviewer expected the solutions to be syntactically correct and functional and was a stickler for corner test cases. I felt the interview was too short for two problems whose solutions were expected to handle all possible test cases.

In the third round, one problem was to build an algorithm for the mobile game Snakes, which used to come on Nokia 3300 or something. I remembered the game, as I had played it myself as a child. The other question was to merge a set of intervals (a set of pairs of time intervals).