I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Research Triangle Park, NC) in Feb 2015
Interview
It was an entire day meeting with managers from a variety of teams. The interview was quite grueling, but fair. They are extremely focused on ensuring that they hire top talent, so they understandably want to be thorough about it. Be prepared to do a LOT of whiteboard coding. You need to be able to explain performance characteristics, code testability, feasibility of algorithms in a production environment, etc.
There will be quite a lot of conversation about CS fundamentals, data structures, and algorithms. Strongly recommend pulling out some college textbooks or going through some interview preparation material if you don't feel confident about these things. Some of the problems are designed to be almost impossible to solve in the time provided - they are more interested in seeing your thought process, so don't get too frustrated during the process.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Implement a queue in any language backed by an array. Explain how to test.
Online interview round.
There would be 4 interview rounds total. Each one evaluate various skills about you. They will give you hints as well at time required, you need to capture those and rethink on your solution.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design worker thread library where each task will be executed in parallel. Design a system to handle a huge workload.
HR screening, one technical interview with the hiring manager then three interview loop which covered two system design and one dsa round.
System design was intensive and challenging.
It took them 5 weeks to come back with an offer. Background check was completed in a week, got joining date after 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for a startup company that let users post various types of content and get a unique url which can be shared with others to access the content