Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience

It began with me walking through past work—microservices, caching, Redis, SQL partitioning, and monitoring. Then, in the last stretch of the call, we moved into a concrete coding-style problem.

I was asked to write pseudo code to aggregate portfolio data year over year. I didn’t end up with a single clean block because the interviewer interrupted with clarifying questions. Instead, I explained the logic in pieces using SQL and pseudo-Python, and I talked through trade-offs as I went. What surprised me was how persistent the focus on scalability became: the interviewer pushed hard on doing