Had an initial interview with a recruiter.

Then had a tech screen (phone interview), followed by an on-site interview with 3 engineering leads, and finally an interview with the manager.

This happened on Friday, and I received the offer on the following Monday.

Incredibly professional, engaging, and challenging. I learned quite a bit about myself in the process.

I must give credit to Microsoft!

From the arrangements (flight, hotel, etc.) to the actual interviews, it was a genuine pleasure. I highly recommend the experience.

Questions on design patterns:

• Design a system for a hypothetical e-commerce store, focusing on entities and making it distributed.

• Print a matrix in spiral fashion. (Arrows indicate how the spiral happens: start at the first arrow, go in a circle, and move to the next arrow, etc.) Matrix input example: ->1 1 1 1 1 1 -> 2 2 2 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 Output: 11111111111111222222

• Clone a linked list that has a cycle (do not fix the cycle). Is there a way to uniquely identify a node without relying on a hash code?

• Develop an XML parser (rules: Node closures and a single root node; i.e., the root node cannot be duplicated in structure).

• Count occurrences of words in a string that is too large to be processed in memory.

• Develop an LRU cache.

• Design a distributed file storage system with load balancing and fail-safes (e.g., a machine taken offline or a new machine/node added).