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).