I submitted my resume online. But it was at the end of year (in december) and the HR said they will be contacting me only in jan or Feb as they normally freeze the hiring fr new grads at that time. As said they contacted me in Feb and asked scheduled a time for a phone screening with one of the dev engineers. The phone screening was normal. The person who contacted me was easy to communicate with. He asked about myself, the projects i worked with and what are my interests and what products that interests me and which team I would like to work with in Microsoft. This was to get an overall idea of where your interest lies in and which team would be a fit for you. Followed by it was a simple algorithm question on linked list to delete a node and to do it in optimized way. Have to give out all the corner cases. After nearly two weeks they called me for an onsite interview. And the process was pretty smooth. Every day i used to receive mails from HR of the things that I need to do and about the travel ad stay. And even received a 'best wishes' mail from them prior to the day of interview. On the day of interview, I was interviewed by 5 people. It involves both technical and behavioral questions. Interview was held at cubicles of the respective engineers and managers. First interview was about detailing my resume. He asked about all the projects that was in my resume. So be well prepared. And also asked if I had any conflicts with other people on the course of project work and how I resolved it. Followed by it was white board coding problems. First it was about how i approach the problem and then have to write a code. Asked about time complexity. Second interview was about the projects again. And he asked me particularly about my internship project. And then asked to solve a problem. We discussed the pros and cons of my approach and then asked to write code. Asked for time complexity. For one problem he asked about the downfall for the approach and then asked if i could find a way to resolve it. I gave him the solution and was moved to the third interview. Third interview was lunch interview. I had no clue about the team I am going to interview with before that morning. And that is the policy of Microsoft not to let the candidates know the team they are going to interview with. So you cant research about them. And so lunch interview is all about you talking. Be ready to question and speak. It all about it. How much you are interested in the job and the team and how good are you at communicating. I started with business model of the team, architecture, technologies used, compared with other technologies, competitors, new features. I also commented on the negative aspects of the product and compared with the features of others. But don't stop talking. If you do well with first three interviews then you will be invited for the fourth one. My fourth interview was more about coming up with my data structure for the problem and then solving a given problem and writing an API. Try to start with normal approach and to make it optimized. And speak your thoughts, even if it may be wrong. They are more than willing to help you out if you are struck. Again this one involved the conflicts you encountered and your influence on any project. It need not be something big. Just show them that you have your opinion and you are in a position to voice it. If you get through the fourth interview , you will be invited for fifth one with the dev manager or director of the team. This one is not technical, but purely you interest again. It was again 60 min of interview. And after one day I was informed that I got selected.

It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.