Microsoft SDE-3 Friday Drive — positive feedback, no further rounds

## Background
I applied directly through Microsoft's careers portal for a Senior Software Engineer (SDE-3) opening.

## Online assessment
A coding assessment leaning heavily on **monotonic stack** and **sliding window** techniques.

## Interview format
Scheduled as part of what Microsoft calls a **"Friday Drive"** — back-to-back slots packed into a single day rather than spread over weeks.

## Round-by-round

### Round 1 — Coding & problem solving (9:00–10:00)
Core DSA. The main problem was a variant of "Longest Substring with At Least K Repeating Characters" (LeetCode 395). Midway through, a situational design question: model an organisational hierarchy (a CEO with multiple layers of reports) using the most suitable data structure.

### Round 2 — Low-level design (10:30–11:30)
Object-oriented design of a system similar to Zomato — core entities, relationships between classes, functional requirements and edge cases. I stayed in the driver's seat, walking the happy path first before exceptions rather than waiting to be prompted.

### Round 3 — High-level design (scheduled)
Planned to cover load balancers and caching strategies. I didn't reach this stage.

### Round 4 — Behavioural / managerial (scheduled)
Expected to cover past challenges and conflicts in **STAR** format. Also not reached.

## Outcome
Positive feedback after both Round 1 and Round 2, but the process didn't move beyond the initial interview day.

**Not selected (post Round 2).**