Microsoft SDE2 Interview Guide
Evidence-backed preparation playbook for Microsoft SDE2 interviews. 7 reported questions, top topics, difficulty breakdown, and a free assessment.
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Top Questions — Ranked by Community Votes
These 6 questions appeared most in Microsoft SDE2 reports. Master these first.
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?