Microsoft·Backend Engineer

Microsoft Backend Engineer interview experience

Got offer

L65Posted Mar 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

I interviewed for a Senior Backend position at Microsoft with a loop that ended in an offer.

The process had five rounds total and mixed coding with behavioral questions, and it leaned heavily into ads and distributed-systems thinking.

The first round combined coding with ads fundamentals and also included a project deep dive plus a handful of behavioral prompts. What surprised me was how much the ads ecosystem explanation mattered—going end-to-end through the chain from advertiser-side actors to DSP and ad exchange, and then through SSP and publishers. It felt like they wanted me to be fluent in the system context, not just solve isolated coding tasks.

Across the loop, the overall

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