Senior SDE Interview Questions at Microsoft
8 real Senior SDE interview questions asked at Microsoft. Covers Technical, System Design, HR rounds. Sourced from engineers who cleared the loop.
Interview Signals — What Microsoft Asks Senior SDEs
All Senior SDE Questions Asked at Microsoft
Design a data structure that supports insert, delete, and getRandom in O(1) average time. Walk through your approach.
Design the "presence" feature in Teams/Slack — showing whether a user is online, away, or in a meeting — that scales to tens of millions of concurrent users with near real-time updates.
Explain the difference between a TypeScript interface and a type alias. Give a concrete case where only one of them can express what you need.
Describe a time you had to learn a completely unfamiliar codebase or technology quickly to unblock a critical deliverable. How did you approach it?
Design a notification system that can send push, email, and SMS, where a user's preferences determine which channels are used, and a failed channel should fall back to another.
In C#, what is the difference between Task.Wait() and await? Why does calling .Wait() on the UI thread risk a deadlock in a way that await does not?
Write a Python decorator @timed that prints how long a function took to execute, and explain how functools.wraps prevents it from breaking introspection.
Rewrite this imperative loop using Java Streams: filter a list of orders for status "PAID", then sum their amounts. Explain one case where a stream would actually perform worse than the loop.
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