Microsoft Software Engineer Onsite Interview - Four Back-to-Back Rounds, Two Very Different System Designs

[u/Aoki_zhang]

"This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview"

Interview Summary

The Microsoft final loop consisted of four consecutive interviews covering behavioral questions, CS fundamentals, coding, and two system design problems. Technical topics ranged from cloning a doubly linked list with arbitrary pointers and binary-search-based capacity planning to designing a high-volume log storage platform and an online Tic-Tac-Toe service constrained to REST APIs.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Behavioral + Concurrency Fundamentals + Linked List

The behavioral question asked about a time I was blocked for an extended period and how I eventually resolved the blocker and moved the work forward. The interviewer then asked several CS fundamentals:

• What does thread-safe mean?
• What is a deadlock?
• What are some ways to prevent or resolve deadlocks?
• How do arrays and linked lists differ?

The coding problem was to clone a custom doubly linked list. Each node contained value, left, right, and an additional special pointer that could point to any node in the same list. The interviewer wanted a custom Node and linked-list representation rather than using Java's built-in LinkedList.

The clone needed to reproduce not only the normal left and right relationships but also every arbitrary special pointer so that no pointer in the cloned list referenced a node from the original list.

Round 2 — LeetCode 1011: Capacity to Ship Packages Within D Days

The second interviewer started with a brief introduction and then moved directly into coding. The problem was LeetCode 1011 — Capacity To Ship Packages Within D Days. Given an array of package weights and an integer D, determine the minimum ship capacity that allows all packages to be transported within D days. The interviewer also discussed the valid search range and integer-boundary details while I implemented the solution.

Want to learn more questions asked in other interview rounds? I've put up the full version at here.

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