I was approached by one of their HR representatives on LinkedIn. Once my profile was shortlisted, they scheduled in-person interviews for a Saturday. The process included four in-person interviews: three technical/programming/problem-solving rounds, followed by one design round. An HR person proactively coordinated all interview rounds for each candidate. I had to travel to Hyderabad (travel was arranged by Microsoft) to complete the design round.

Each round involved a brief discussion about my profile, key challenges faced, and how those challenges were solved. Then, there were programming/problem-solving/design questions. For me, the design round was conducted by the hiring manager, one of the top individuals at MSIDC, and it was the toughest round of all.

When you are asked to write code, please ensure you consider all boundary cases and syntax. They observe everything: how you approach the problem, find a solution, and your implementation. Every viewpoint is respected and discussed. Correct answers are good, but the thought process is most important to them. You should ask a sufficient number of questions during or before arriving at solutions.

This was by far the best interview I have attended to date, including my Amazon interview experience. I was initially considered for SDE II, but when I received the offer, I was given the title of Senior Software Engineer. They also offered me a very good package.

Their recruitment team moves very fast. The whole process could take two to three weeks, or even less.

1. Reverse a sentence.

2. A variation of sorting of k-sorted arrays.

3. Prefix trees, search, and ranking.

4. Puzzle on probability: There is a village where couples keep having boys until they have a girl child. I was asked to find the boys to girls children ratio in that village.

5. In a windowing system, given a window size of m * n pixels and a set of different-sized rectangles, how to find the shortest area rectangle for a mouse click? (This is an algorithmic plus design problem).

Design Round

1. There is a company that has everything in OS X. They have a file server. Microsoft wants to offer them Windows NT servers for this. How can Microsoft do the needful without affecting users?

• Before jumping to a solution, I would suggest asking as many questions as possible to understand what is actually needed. The problem looks like Microsoft has to implement the back-end server, but the exact amount of work depends on existing tech choices and design. We should be able to reuse a lot of existing implementation.

1. Cortana wants to display reminders for users. The overall architecture.

• Ask as many questions as you can and understand the problem.