I was contacted by a recruiter through a referral and got a call for an interview in a couple of weeks.

It went for about 45 minutes, and the interviewer asked me questions about auto-scaling, load balancing, and a lot of questions on distributed systems. He asked me to implement a queue, which was easy.

After a couple of weeks, I was flown to Redmond and had four back-to-back interviews. The range of questions varied a lot in all the interviews.

I had to explain in detail the projects I had worked on. In fact, one of the interviews was solely based on one of my most complicated projects that required a lot of knowledge about distributed systems, NoSQL, SQL, and scaling. He asked me about issues existing in the current system and how to make changes to the current implementation to take care of a huge number of requests made to the database.

All in all, the whole process was pretty exciting. I was nervous at first, but the moment I met with my first interviewer, I became confident and composed.

If you go for a final round, it indicates that you did pretty well. It was a great experience.

Prepare threads well. MS loves that.

I did not expect to be grilled so badly on my projects.