Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience

I first had a coding stage where I ended up dealing with DSA-style problems, and later rounds included deeper discussion around system design and security testing concepts. That combination of coding plus broader architecture thinking made the process feel more intense than a pure LeetCode loop.

In one of the rounds, I worked through a graph-adjacent problem set, and there were checks on approach and correctness—sometimes the interviewer emphasized just the way I thought about it rather than insisting I run everything end-to-end. The overall theme was efficiency: if the solution wasn’t