Microsoft
Software Engineer II (SDE-2)
Selected Medium
- Interviewed
- April 2026
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Location
- Bengaluru
- Shared by
- Anonymous
Overview
An experienced engineer in Bengaluru reports an offer after a recruiter reach-out, a Codility online assessment and four virtual onsite rounds. The loop covered data structures and algorithms, low-level design, high-level design and a final conversation with a senior manager. The candidate stresses that interviewers cared about clean code, edge cases and the reasoning behind every technical choice.
Interview rounds
-
1
Online Assessment (Codility)
Two medium-difficulty problems on arrays and strings. -
2
Round 1
DSA and Coding: Graphs and dynamic programming, including finding a shortest path in a weighted grid under extra constraints. Clean code and edge-case handling were evaluated closely. -
3
Round 2
Low-Level Design: Design a vending machine or a parking lot. The discussion went deep into SOLID principles and which patterns, such as State or Strategy, make the design easier to extend. -
4
Round 3
High-Level Design: Design a distributed key-value store similar to Redis. Most of the time went to sharding, replication and the consistency versus availability trade-off. -
5
Round 4
Hiring Manager (As Appropriate): A senior manager mixed deep dives into past project architecture with behavioral questions about growth mindset and handling disagreements.
Tips and takeaways
Practise Microsoft-tagged LeetCode mediums and build solid system design fundamentals. Be ready to justify why you picked a design or data structure, not just what you picked. Prepare examples that show a growth mindset and how you handled technical disagreements.
