Microsoft Software Development Engineer interview questions
based on 1.2K ratings - Updated Jul 22, 2025
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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%
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I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
There was career fair in the school and I was attending there. In MS booth, I found the appropriate position and drop my resume. Several days later, I got the email to assign the phone screening interview. I got several questions about OOP concept and sort algorithms. And then I got the email from MS and they said they want to invite me for the on site interview in Seattle. there are 3 interviewer for on site interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1st interviewer asked about the Data structure question like Linked list and queue and binary tree. and he request to code queue and circular queue. and 2nd interviewer ask me Least Recently Used (LRU) Cache questions. And I did not know about it so he explained me how it works and he ask coding. 3rd interviewer asked me about the function pointer in C/C++ and how Java language can work like function pointer in C/C++. Does Java capable to pass the parameter using "call by reference" or "call by value"? How Java can pass the address of object?
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
The interviewer spent 70% of the time going over my resume and asking me behavioral questions, which didn't really leave that much time for the technical question. While answering the technical question the interviewer was completely silent the entire time and didn't really offer much detail when I asked for clarification.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of numbers how would you determine all the numbers that repeated more than once?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Apr 2014
Interview
First round was incredibly easy, just describe how you would find a missing element in array of numbers in a range. I used a hashmap.
Be prepared for the on-site interviews, they are incredibly tiring as there are 4 or so rounds! They take extremely good care of you so just be prepared for a long interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Check if something is an anagram of something else in C. Only allowed usage of arrays and must remove special characters. Implement to-lower as part of the question.