Microsoft Sr. Software Engineer interview questions
based on 307 ratings - Updated May 30, 2026
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54%
Applied online
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27%
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13%
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Employee Referral
2%
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2%
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1%
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Staffing Agency
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Sr. Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 61.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Sr. Software Engineer roles take an average of 56 days to get hired, when considering 3 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Microsoft overall takes an average of 31 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Sr. Software Engineer according to 3 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 50%
Phone interview: 50%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
This interview included Telephonic and Online technical interviews. There were a total of 4-5 rounds I think. There were Good interviewers and I had a good experience. I was interviewing for frontend
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a JSON object, Normalise it so that it can be traversed in min time.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Microsoft (Nairobi)
Interview
Very friendly. Very interactive. Open to listening to and exploring your solutions even if it differs from the one expected by the interviewer. Four different interviewers one of which is the hiring manager for the position.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Jun 2023
Interview
Got referred by an engineering manager there, so my first interview was with a staff engineer. This was the worst interview experience I've ever had in my 10+ year career working at 7 companies and doing lots of interviews in between. The interview is based on these silly leetcode brainteaser kind of questions that is designed to make candidates fail if they didn't specifically study for these kinds of questions and were lucky enough to have a chance to see a question that they've seen before where they can memorize the algorithm and the answer, instead of any actual real life software engineering skills.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
My first question was very specific to Java/C# where my main language was with JavaScript, I was asked about to implement threadpooling in a language of choice which is very java specific where JavaScript is a single threaded language so it didnt make any sense. The second question was the leetcode question I was asked this leet code question https://leetcode.com/problems/rotate-image/ , rotating a 2D matrix clockwise, good luck figuring out how to solve it in your brain let alone writing it in code.