I applied through university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Dublin, Dublin) in Oct 2018
Interview
First, I had a phone interview with the recruiter about my latest side projects, previous job experience and what are my interests in a position at Microsoft. At the end of the call she told me to chose one date for the on-site interview.
I interviewed in Dublin, Ireland. They paid for the hotel and the transportation.
At on-site, I had 4 interviews. The problems where easy-medium style similar to those from leetcode.
First interview:
20 mins talk about previous experience and side projects. I had the luck to be an intern before (2 years before) in the same organization as my interviewer.
1 problem: Implement a function to simplify a unix based path.
Second interview:
5 min talk about projects and 1 problem with followup.
Third interview:
10 min talk about projects
2 problems, one with followup.
Fourth interview:
10 min talk about projects and afterwards a kind-of system design problem where we discussed how to implement the dynamic allocation of resources in Azure. This was related to what are they doing when you ask for 4 cores and if needed to scale at 16 cores. How do you actually find those cores and map them to that client.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Implement a function to simplify a unix based path. Example:
input: /a/b/../c/.
output: /a/c
Given a binary tree root and function which prints the value of the node at the (x,y) position in the screen, write a function to print the entire tree in the screen. A lot of edge cases to take care here...
1. The resolution of the screen (its dimensions).
2. Cannot collapse two values at the screen.
3. How do you take care of large numbers on the same vertical line?
4. This was the follow-up question. Maybe it was because I first started with using the same distance for all the children at the same level. The question was to optimize the distance used. For example to use only distance 1 if I didn't need more. Some examples to understand what I talking about.
1
d=1 / \ d = 1
2 3
1
/ \ d = 2
/ \
2 5
/ \ / \ d = 1
3 4 6 7
You can not use d=1 at the first level because 4 and 6 will collide.
Implement a function to merge 2 sorted arrays into a third array. Followup, to do in-place considering one array can contain all the elements.
Third problem was to reverse a linked list.
First problems I coded in java for the third he wanted to use C/C++ (to see how I do with pointers).
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft in Sept 2025
Interview
Three rounds - Includes Behavioral, Technical and a Bar Raiser Round.
Asked questions from my resume started with basic system designing and explored my knowledge in system design using microservices architecture.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Distributed Systems LLD Designing. Programming question random
Started with phone screening it went well then headed to a full loop of 3 rounds. Round 1 - LRU cache, Round 2- I don't remeber clearly but it was not that hard, leetcode medium, Round 3- easy binary sorting problem.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Past college project and a technical challenge I faced.
Round 1 - LRU cache, Round 2- I don't remeber clearly but it was not that hard, leetcode medium, Round 3- easy binary sorting problem.
Firstly Phone Interview * 1
Then on-site interview *3
Finally interview with Team Lead
Each interview has live coding problems included
Merely no behavior questions
all in Chinese, but one interviewer requested an english introduction
The interview process went very quickly
Interviewers were nice and polite
