SDE2 Interview Questions at Microsoft
7 real SDE2 interview questions asked at Microsoft. Covers Technical, System Design, HR rounds. Sourced from engineers who cleared the loop.
Interview Signals — What Microsoft Asks SDE2s
All SDE2 Questions Asked at Microsoft
Design Microsoft Teams' presence system. How do you propagate "online / away / busy" status to millions of users with sub-second latency without overwhelming the backend?
Design Azure Blob Storage. How do you store, replicate, and serve petabytes of unstructured data with 11 nines of durability? Cover: chunking, erasure coding vs 3-way replication, geo-redundancy, and handling hot blobs.
Given a 2D grid of 0s and 1s, count the number of islands. Then extend: find the largest island, and then explain how you would solve this for a streaming grid that changes in real time using a Union-Find structure.
Design a collaborative code editor like VS Code Live Share. Multiple developers edit the same file simultaneously with cursors visible to all. Cover: OT vs CRDT, undo/redo in a collaborative context, and low-latency sync across regions.
Explain the difference between process and thread in Windows. What is a fiber? Describe how the .NET thread pool works and when you would use async/await vs raw Thread vs ThreadPool.
Microsoft asks about "growth mindset". Tell me about a significant technical failure you experienced. What did you learn and how did you change your approach as a result?
Given a matrix of 0s and 1s, find the largest rectangle containing only 1s and return its area. Walk through the histogram-based O(n*m) solution and discuss why the naive O(n2*m2) approach is unacceptable at scale.
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