I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru) in Jun 2017
Interview
Shortened loop due to a prior experience and a referral. 5 onsite interview rounds including 4 technical and a culture fit round. Overall the questions were creative and not the usual leetcode variants. The interviewers were more focussed on making sure I had experience designing large scale distributed systems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Design a tiny url service.
2. Describe technology trends that will disrupt the industry in the coming years.
3. Back of the napkin calculation on number of Google drive users in the world? How would you relate to known data and extra polate?
4. Design a analytics stream pipeline for microsoft exchange server logs that are highly sensitive in nature and include PII? The catch here was to design such that data does not leave the source. I however, designed with data anonymization leaving the source and traveling through a pipeline of independent systems loosely connected with a messaging system which did not solve the problem 100%.
5. Design a logging utility, major interfaces and class diagram.
6. Design a Devops utility tool to allow resource allocation and automated deploy and rollback of software components. I had read the Google Borg paper, so I just picked salient features from there. This interview stretched to a hour and a half and went into great details of choice of tech stack to solving interesting questions on resource allocation. The interviewer was very bright.
7. Culture fit round mostly included questions on past experience and leadership skills.