Microsoft Senior Software Engineer interview questions
based on 307 ratings - Updated May 30, 2026
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Senior Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 67.6% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft in Jan 2007
Interview
I was not really prepared for this interview. The inverviewer asked me a puzzle. I don't remember the puzzle correctly and I made a slight mistake somewhere. I was able to solve it in the end but it did not impress the interviewer. He asked me to wait for the next round but it never happend.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
it was something like - you got 5 camels that need to go 500 miles. They need to drink certain amount of water to go 100 miles. But water is available only now and at the destination. Each camel can carry water need for it for the next 100 miles. How do u transport the camels. The question was not tough but I messed up somewhere in the middle.. any case I could solve it in the end.
The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2008
Interview
As a college student, Microsoft first came to my Campus to give me an interview, where they asked me a challenging programming logic question. I passed that interview, and they flew me to Seattle for an on-site interview. Over the course of a day, I had 4 interviews that were much like my on campus interview. At each interview, I was asked a technical question. From what I heard, it seemed that only about one out of every four people who are flown to Seattle will receive an offer.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
You have a list of red and blue objects. You have to sort them using swapping in order N time.
Given a set of people, one of them is a celebrity. You have a 2D array which describes which people know each other, that is [N, M] is true if N knows M. The celebrity will not know anyone (except them self) and everyone will know the celebrity. Find an order N algorithm to find the celebrity.
You have list of numbers that are sorted but shifted. That is, a list like [5, 6, 1, 2, 3] or [15, 17, 20, 25, 2, 8] is given. Find the most efficient way to search for a number in this type of list.