Me postulé en línea. El proceso tomó 4 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Microsoft (Belgrade) en mar 2024
Entrevista
3 hour long interviews one after the other. The interviews were all technical with coding and similar but with three different people. The questions were very focused on data structures. You are given a problem/task and have to comment which structure you want to use for it and implement it. Even though the structures were some "simpler" ones like queues and hash maps it included recognizing, commenting and explaining of modifications to them so you can adapt their functionalities like priority queues and linked hash maps.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
There are operations that can be committed to a bank account. Those operations are queued in some way until you use a commit function that performs them. Explain how you would implement this, which structures you would use and then code it
Process: 3 virtual interviews in a single day (75 minutes each) via MS Teams and HackerRank.
Overall Experience: Positive, highly technical, and deeply focused on data structures, optimization, and system design.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Round 1: Project & Architecture Review (75 mins)Focus: Deep dive into past technical experience.Details: The entire round was dedicated to presenting a personal/academic project. The interviewer asked detailed questions regarding the system's architecture, specific algorithmic choices, trade-offs, and design decisions.Round 2: Coding / Algorithms (75 mins)Focus: Problem-solving, bitwise operations, and array manipulation.Questions Asked:Bitwise Operation (LeetCode 2275 - Largest Combination With Bitwise AND Greater Than Zero): Given an array of integers, find the size of the largest subset where the bitwise AND of all elements is greater than zero. Insight: Count the number of set bits (1s) at each of the 32 bit positions across all numbers.Frequency Tracking (LeetCode 169 - Majority Element): Given an array, find the element that appears at least $n/2$ times (guaranteed to exist). Can be solved using a Hash Map ($O(n)$ space) or optimized using the Boyer-Moore Voting Algorithm ($O(1)$ space).Round 3: Low-Level Design (LLD) (75 mins)Focus: Object-Oriented Design (OOD) and data structure integration.Details: Design a parking lot system. The core challenge evolved into choosing the optimal combination of data structures to achieve $O(1)$ efficiency for parking, leaving, and tracking the physical index of each vehicle.Key Solution Concept: Integrating a Fixed-size Array (to maintain physical indices), a Doubly Linked List (to manage the pool of free spots), and a Hash Map (to map vehicle IDs to list nodes).
3 rounds of leetcode medium, 2 questions were very easy, the last one was really hard (it was a binary tree question). They asked about space and time complexity. In terms of structures it was straight forward but the question itself was hard
Behavioural round consisted of "Tell me about yourself and why you wanna work for microsoft and resume screening. And technical interview consisted of 2 LC question 1 medium and 1 easy.