Microsoft·Software Engineer

Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience

No offer

Posted Jan 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

I went through an SDE 2 path where the interview experience felt heavily centered on a single early DSA round, and in my case it ended in rejection right after that first technical screen.

The setup was pretty algorithm-focused and leaned on LeetCode-style problems.

In one run, the DSA question involved generating all letter combinations of digits on a phone keypad, and I worked through it with the usual data-structure thinking. In the variant of the screen I ran through alongside it, the prompt was framed as a story about a planet with two species, where I had to solve it using approaches like hashing with linked-list ideas and then also apply graph traversal with BFS. I remember spending time mapping how to represent the world, then using BFS to explore—either way, it was

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