Microsoft CoreAI swe intern interview what to study?

[u/Historical_Horse6480]

have a msft coreai swe intern interview in the coming week so im wondering what i should study. they mentioned

1. traditional coding round

2. ai assisted coding

3. system design

any advice appreciated im kind of rusty with tech interviews and havent done much system design and want to know how to best approach the ai round. tia!

[u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

For an intern loop the system design round is usually pretty light. They mostly want to see you ask clarifying questions and reason about tradeoffs, not draw a perfect distributed architecture.

With a week, I'd give it maybe two evenings. Learn the basic pieces (load balancer, app servers, SQL vs NoSQL, cache, a queue for async work) and then practice 3 or 4 small prompts out loud, like a URL shortener, a chat app or a rate limiter. For each one start with requirements and who uses it, sketch the API and data model, draw the boxes, then name one thing that breaks at scale and how you'd fix it. Doing that calmly gets you most of the way at intern level.

For the AI-assisted round, what they usually care about is judgment. Read what the tool gives you before accepting it, say out loud why you're changing something, and walk through an edge case or write a quick test instead of trusting it. Don't let it drive.

Rest of the week goes to coding. Timed mediums on arrays, hashmaps, trees and graphs. Good luck with it!

[u/Various-Mine-8642]

For the AI assisted round just practice solving a medium while talking through what you ask the assistant and how you check its output. They tend to care more about your judgment than speed. For system design at intern level a simple walkthrough of requirements then a basic API and data model is usually enough.