Microsoft·Data Scientist

Microsoft Data Scientist interview experience

Got offer

Hard

Positive

United StatesPosted Jul 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

I ended up going through a pretty intense, technically heavy loop, and it started with the kind of work that feels closer to real modeling than to trivia.

After an initial recruiter-style step, I had a technical round where I worked through an ML project and had to make tradeoffs around evaluation. A big theme was how to handle classification when costs are asymmetric, and I was also asked to explain SHAP in the context of what I’d built. The part that surprised me most was that I got a question on precision and recall that felt extremely familiar—very close to something I’d practiced beforehand.

Later rounds kept the momentum going in a similar direction: designing an A/B test and then working through a SQL-style question tied to user

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