MSCI Backend Engineer interview experience

They introduced the team and a project briefly, and then asked me to describe a challenge I’d faced as a developer. After I answered, the interview didn’t turn into a normal back-and-forth about my background—it pivoted quickly into an intense evaluation.

They showed me a complex Java class and asked me to review it immediately like a live code review. There weren’t many instructions and almost no thinking window, which made me anxious right away. Then they pushed into live-coding tasks, including recursive algorithm work and Big O improvements. They said they wanted to practice system