Microsoft Software Development Engineer interview questions
based on 1.2K ratings - Updated Jul 22, 2025
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Microsoft interviews FAQs
Software Development Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 71.3% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Development Engineer roles take an average of 1 day to get hired, when considering 1 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Microsoft overall takes an average of 46 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Software Development Engineer according to 1 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 100%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Jul 2014
Interview
Contacted by recruiter, whole process took about 1.5 month. After phone interview, recruiter told me I 'll have 3 rounds for onsite, but I actually got five rounds, each one for 1h... All interviewers are really nice people.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Normal interview questions, not hard. 1. Search element in rotated sorted array. 2 Find top two biggest elements in array. 3. Inorder tree traversal (implement iterator). 4. LinkedList operation...Forget other questions, but they are all pretty easy.
I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru) in Aug 2014
Interview
5 rounds - 3 days
round 1 was 15 output based programming questions , for 30 minutes
was very easy
round - 2 was coding - had two questions
was easy , but I hadn't practiced enough coding.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bellevue, WA) in Jun 2014
Interview
I wen through the full interview process, from recruiter screen up to the full day in person interviews in Bellevue (the position was for the Dynamics AX platform).
My initial technical screen was pretty standard, the question was determining if two strings were anagrams of each other. Aside from this I was able to speak with the senior engineer who was interviewing my about the position and some pro's and con's which was really great. He provided some good insight for me.
After the technical screen I was invited in for full day of interviews in Bellevue. I flew out to Seattle and stayed for 2 nights. The entire travel process was great, they covered everything and put me up
in a nice hotel. The interview day was long, I had a series of interviews each testing different areas.
All of the interviews were with senior engineers with 5 - 20 years experience.
The first interview covered SQL, I was given a schema and asked to point out any issues/improvements and then write some queries.
The next 2 covered CS based questions like algorithms, runtime analysis .. etc.
Next I had a lunch interview where I was able to talk with another engineer about his role and get a little more of a sense of the day to day life.
Finally I had one more algorithms based interview and that was the end.
Overall I found that the interview process was very well done and the hr staff at Microsoft were really easy to deal with. When it comes to the atmosphere at Microsoft it has a really corporate feel to it and truthfully it was not my top choice having been there but that's more of a personal preference.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a number write a function to convert that number to a string that would be seen on a cheque.
Example:
2376 becomes two thousand three hundred and seventy six.