Microsoft software engineering interview questions

The Process

Five rounds, and the last one can overturn the other four

01

20 to 30 minPhone call

Recruiter screen

Short and mostly logistics, but the recruiter writes down a target level and Microsoft will not tell you what it is. Everything after this is scheduled against that number.

Ask which level the loop is calibrated to.
Recruiters will often say 62 or 63 out loud even when they will not put it in writing. Without it you cannot tell whether a design round is coming.
Ask which org the team reports into.
Azure, Gaming, Office and GitHub run the same official loop but weight design, operations and product sense very differently.
Give a total number, not a base number.
Base is banded tightly by level. The cash bonus and the stock grant have wide ranges, so the room to move sits in the parts you did not name.

02

45 to 60 minCoderPad

Technical phone screen

Either a Codility style timed quiz or a live CoderPad session, depending on the org and whether you came through university recruiting. Many teams turn off autocomplete, and going quiet is marked down.

Narrate before you type, not after.
A silent five minutes reads as stuck even when the code is right. Communication is written up as a separate score, not folded into the result.
Practise once without an IDE.
Muscle memory for imports and syntax goes fast when nothing is completing for you, and that is where the minutes disappear.
Ask what happens after the screen.
Some teams move straight to an offer from a strong screen at the lower bands. Others always run the full loop. It changes how you pace yourself.

03

4 to 5 roundsOne dayNo AI tools

The onsite loop

Four or five rounds back to back: two or three coding, one system design from L63 upward, one behavioural against the culture framework. Below L63 the design round is object design, which catches people who only prepped scale.

Every interviewer has to say hire.
One no hire from a peer round is usually enough to end it, so there is no round you can afford to treat as a warm up.
Object design means SOLID, out loud.
Class boundaries, interfaces, and where you would put the extension point. Drawing boxes without naming the tradeoff scores low.
Growth mindset is scored, not implied.
Saying you learn quickly is the answer that fails. What lands is a decision you got wrong, the feedback, and what you did differently after.

04

45 to 60 minSenior leaderVeto power

Final synthesising round

A skip level or senior engineer who already holds every other write up, probes what is still ambiguous, then authors the recommendation. Microsoft has officially retired the old name, As Appropriate.

Being invited is already good news.
Loops that are going badly tend to be closed before this round is booked, so treat the invitation as evidence rather than a formality.
They set the level, not the recruiter.
A strong loop with a lukewarm AA usually comes back as a down level offer rather than a rejection, and that costs about two years.
Have a real answer to why Microsoft.
Naming a product you actually use and one thing you would change about it beats anything about scale or impact.

05

1 to 3 weeksRecruiter

Debrief, level and offer

There is no standing hiring committee. The hiring manager decides with the recruiter, then level and compensation go through an approval chain, and that is where most candidates stop hearing anything.

Silence here is process, not rejection.
Level approval and budget sign off run separately from the hiring team, and a week of nothing usually means paperwork.
Negotiate the stock and the sign on.
Base moves inside a narrow level range. The on hire stock grant and the sign on have far more room, and recruiters expect to be asked.
Ask when the fiscal year bonus lands.
Microsoft settles cash bonuses once a year in August, prorated from your start date, so a late joining date quietly costs you.

Levels and Pay

Three quarters of it is cash, which is rarer than it sounds

Pick a level to see how the package splits, what changes by city, and what the loop actually asks of you at that band.

Seattle

Bay Area

New York

Dublin

Level	Experience	Total comp
Software EngineerL60Entry	0 to 2 yrs	~$175K
Software Engineer IIL62Mid	2 to 5 yrs	~$219K
Senior EngineerL63Senior	5 to 9 yrs	~$257K
Principal EngineerL65Principal	9 to 14 yrs	~$340K
Partner EngineerL68Partner	15+ yrs	~$867K

Live Question Feed

What Microsoft is asking right now

60 questions · new ones added every 7 days

60 Verified

CODING

Given two singly linked lists, find the node where they intersect, then do it again without measuring either length.

Technical phone screen

45 to 60 min

CoderPad

Reported 11 times

Open

SYSTEM DESIGN

Design OneDrive: chunked upload, a metadata service, and a sync engine that resolves offline conflicts.

Locked

BEHAVIORAL

Tell me about feedback that was hard to hear, and what you changed because of it.

Locked

OBJECT DESIGN

Model a parking garage with floors, vehicle classes and pricing, then defend the class boundaries.

Locked

CODING

Return the minimum number of meeting rooms needed for a set of overlapping intervals.

Locked

FINAL ROUND

Why Microsoft, and why this team rather than the three others that would take you?

Locked

SYSTEM DESIGN

Design the telemetry pipeline behind a product running on a billion devices, and bound the cost.

Locked

BEHAVIORAL

Which Microsoft product would you change first, and what would you cut to pay for it?

Locked

CODING

Given a dictionary and a string, return every sentence the string can be segmented into.

Locked

59 more questions available

The exact questions Microsoft is asking this week, tagged by round and difficulty.

Unlock All 60 Questions

Each question stays in the bank for 14 days, so everything here was asked in the last 14 days. Candidates who see them first pass at 3.2 times the normal rate.

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The Unfair Advantage

Why this actually works

01

Real questions, not guesses

Collected from engineers who sat the loop, then cross validated against other intel sources.

02

Fresh every week

The database updates every 7 days, so you never study stale problems.

03

Covers every round

Coding without autocomplete, object design, system design, growth mindset stories and the final synthesising round.

04

120+ companies tracked

Also interviewing at Google, Amazon or OpenAI? We have their questions too.

05

Difficulty and pattern data

Tagged by difficulty, round and category, so you know where prep time goes.

06

Candidate verified only

Reported by a candidate, then cross verified against multiple data points.

3.2×

Higher pass rate

120+

Companies tracked

3.2K+

Engineers using this

FAQ

Common questions

How are the questions sourced?

Directly from engineers who interviewed at Microsoft, then cross validated against other intel sources into a stack ranked list.

How often are questions updated?

We add new questions every 7 days and retire each one after 14 days, so the bank turns over twice in the window it covers. Azure, Office, Gaming and GitHub run separate banks, so prompts shift by org.

Does Microsoft ask LeetCode questions?

Yes, mostly medium. The trap is the editor: a plain shared pad, no autocomplete, no syntax highlighting, and silence while you type is scored against you.

Can I use AI tools in the interview?

No. Microsoft states it in the candidate instructions for every live round, and the shared pad is watched while you type.

What is the final synthesising round?

A skip level or senior engineer added only if the earlier rounds went well. They read every other write up, probe what is still open, then author the recommendation. Microsoft has retired the old As Appropriate name.

What does Microsoft pay a Software Engineer II?

Around $219K in Seattle and about $237K in the Bay Area. Only 15 percent is stock, and the annual cash bonus is a bigger slice than most people expect.

How long does the process take?

Four to six weeks. The loop itself is one day, but the final synthesising round and the level and offer approval each add their own wait. Org variance between Azure, Gaming, Office and AI is unusually high.

Is this just for Microsoft?

No. GothamLoop covers 120+ companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Apple.

The Microsoft interview cheat code nobody talks about

Five rounds, and the last one can overturn the other four

Recruiter screen

Technical phone screen

The onsite loop

Final synthesising round

Debrief, level and offer

Three quarters of it is cash, which is rarer than it sounds

What Microsoft is asking right now

Why this actually works

Real questions, not guesses

Fresh every week

Covers every round

120+ companies tracked

Difficulty and pattern data

Candidate verified only

Common questions

Pricing plan

Company Interview Guides