I applied online. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Sydney) in Mar 2024
Interview
I applied in Microsoft Australia. The recuriter reached out to me with technical screen phone call and start the process, she mentioned there would be five rounds of technical interviews, but actually it was four. Each round included around 15 minues mixed with general technical questions and behavioural questions. 30 mins of coding, which are generally medium to hard level of leetcode questions, and afterwards by extending the coding questions to system design questions and that could last another 15 mins. With some interesting topics, the interviewers were pretty smart as well, could spend more than one hour to discussion solutions/questions with interviewees, and those discussions were pretty enjoyable!
As the interviers are all around the world, interviews were conducted in early AEST time or late AEST time, I denied the ones in mid-night. In general it's a very enjoyable process.
Drawback is, the interview process took VERY long, it took me more than 9 weeks, and background check for another four weeks. However, I did enjoy some time off between jobs.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I feel like it's no point to share the actual questions and be prepared for Leetcode type of questions, medium to hard level. Thinking process is more important than make sure the code is bug free, however, it's better to prepare test cases and get the code working.
Mine question types were: intervals, arrays, map and multi-thread handling. Hope those helps.
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