Microsoft Research Software Development Engineer interview questions

Very pleasant interview process. Since I'm about to graduate with a PhD, I interviewed with two teams: one a very research-y team, and the other a software development team. Both interviews were extremely pleasant. The interviewers were genuinely nice, and allowed me plenty of time for me to ask them questions about the team and the role I would play. In terms of actual questions, the research-y team had most of the interviewers asking me about my ideas on the research problems they were trying to solve, with only one actual "coding" interview, which dealt with the standard tree traversal questions, and the design for a battleship game, with the challenge question being about how to scale up the battleship game to a large grid. The other team had more coding style questions, but most of them were not about writing code per se, but more of designing data structures and algorithms to solve specific problems in distributed sorting, google doc style spreadsheets, etc. Lots of puzzle/brainteaser questions from this team as well. Overall, a great interview experience!