Phone interview, followed by an on-campus interview. The real meat, however, was in the on-location interview.
Essentially, from 8 AM to 5 PM, I met with various current employees of different ranks on the team I was going to join. The questions covered standard conversation topics, probed the depths of my understanding of certain problems, included standard algorithm-focused coding interviews, and even presented some pure brainteaser questions.
I mentioned I had done AI for a video game. I told them I used A* for pathfinding, but when they probed me on it, I admitted I had used a library implementation and didn't understand the algorithm in detail. I was then tasked with trying to derive it, knowing that it essentially boils down to Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm plus a bias.
The following metrics were computed from 214 interview experiences for the Microsoft Software Development Engineer role in Redmond, Washington.
Microsoft's interview process for their Software Development Engineer roles in Redmond, Washington is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Microsoft's Software Development Engineer interview process in Redmond, Washington.