Microsoft SDE 2026 Intern Interview Experience｜Two rounds of 90 minutes full records

This time we bring you the United States Microsoft corporation SDE 2026 intern interview experience. Microsoft's interview process is a bit special compared to that of linen and Google: there is no strict time allocation, but rather depends on the interviewer's personal habits, and the overall atmosphere is relatively more free.

My process this time was two rounds of technical interviews, 45 minutes each with a 15 minute break in between. Although the overall framework is similar, each part of the process may vary depending on the interviewer's style.

Microsoft SDE 2026 Intern Overall structure of the interview

The technical side of Microsoft is generally divided into three parts:

First 15 minutes: Behavioral Questions (BQ);
20 minutes in between.: Coding Ring;
Last 5 minutes: QA.

But the actual situation may not be completely according to this distribution to go. For example, some friends have encountered an interviewer who skipped the BQ directly and wrote code throughout the interview; others have encountered an interviewer who particularly likes to follow up questions and constantly throws out follow-ups when writing questions, resulting in the QA time being completely squeezed out later.

I was asked in both rounds of the BQ, but the depth wasn't great. It's not like the "Dive Deep" kind of questions that ask for details, but it's more like Microsoft is trying to get a quick understanding of your communication style in the team, how you handle conflicts, and whether you've ever been in charge of a project independently. It's enough to prepare a few common stories, you don't need to prepare dozens or twenties of big stories.

Another obvious difference is that Microsoft's coding session is very often dictating the topic, instead of posting a big paragraph of requirements in the interview platform like OA. You need to confirm the requirements while listening, and if you misunderstand the requirements, you may realize that the direction is wrong halfway through the writing process. So communication is really critical.

Round 1 - OneDrive File System

The first round of interviews was about a simplified version of a file system design in the context of OneDrive.

Instead of throwing out the complete requirements directly at the beginning, the interviewer first asked me what features I would need if I were to design a simple file system. After our discussion, the finalized requirements included:

mkdir(path): Creates a directory in the given path;
addContentToFile(path, content): Write or append content to a file;
readContentFromFile(path): Read the contents of the file.

Ideas

The idea is not really complicated, it is to use a tree structure (similar to Trie):

Each node can be either a folder or a file;
Folder nodes store child node mappings (Map / Dictionary);
The file node stores a string as the file content;
The path is handled with the / Separate into arrays and find or create corresponding nodes layer by layer.

An example:

/a/b/c.txt

It will be split into ["a","b","c.txt"], then find it layer by layer starting from the root node and create it if the path does not exist.

There are a few points to keep in mind during the realization:

Distinguishing between files and folders → File nodes no longer store child nodes; folders store maps;
Additional Writes → addContent can't be overridden directly, it has to be append;
Create a new one if the path is incomplete → mkdir needs to be patched level by level.

After I finished writing, the interviewer didn't ask me to run a test case, but just asked me to walk through the code and explain what to do if there are some boundary cases (such as reading a file to a path that doesn't exist). Overall, I feel that this round emphasizes on design thinking and communication rather than extreme debugging.

For the final QA, he asked me some questions about my internship experience, such as how I drove the project in the team and whether I encountered any resistance, which was kind of an easy way to wrap up.

Round 2 - Teams Meeting Booking System

In the second round, the topic was closer to business, the interviewer said the context was Microsoft Teams and asked me to design a simplified conference room booking system:

book(start, end): If the new meeting does not conflict with an existing meeting, return to the true and save; otherwise return false.

Ideas

This question is really a interval overlap problem:

violent solution (math.)
Store all meeting intervals with a list, and each time a new meeting is inserted, traverse all intervals to check for overlap. Complexity O(n), simple to implement.
Optimization of solutions
expense or outlay ordered structure(e.g. TreeMap, balanced binary tree, ordered set) stores the sessions, sorted by start time. When inserting a new interval, just check if its previous and next intervals conflict, reducing the complexity to O(log n).

Interview process

I wrote the list solution first and then discussed the performance issue with the interviewer. He then followed up with a question:

If the number of sessions is particularly high, won't the violent solution time out?
Is there any way to optimize insertion to be faster?
If we also want to support query functionality (e.g. checking if a certain time period is available), how is the system going to be extended?

I've talked about the TreeMap solution and how it can be extended to segment tree or balanced BST to support more complex queries.

The interviewer also asked about a couple of boundary conditions, such as:

Do [10, 20) and [20, 30) count as a conflict? (Answer: No, the intervals are left-closed and right-open)
If a user books multiple back-to-back meetings in a row, how does the system store them so that there are no bugs?

The QA session ended up being a very long one, even exceeding the time limit by 5 minutes. He asked me if I was more interested in designing systems in the future or if I was more interested in the underlying implementation, so I chatted a bit about my personal interests.

Overall Impression

Microsoft's interviews give me the impression that they do not emphasize the fixed process as much as linen, but focus more on the interaction between the candidate and the interviewer.

Part BQ: Not too much depth, just speak clearly about your project, teamwork and problem solving approach;
Coding section: Instead of just writing questions, you need to be able to quickly understand the dictated requirements, confirming them as you go;
Follow-up: The interviewer may throw a lot of extension questions to examine whether you can continue to optimize on existing ideas.

Another small detail: Microsoft is a large group of unified recruiting, recruiting people and then assigned to a specific team, I heard that the Indian team headcount is particularly large (the amount of three brothers is very large), so the final group can be into which depends entirely on luck. I can only say that I will save up my luck and hope that I can be assigned to a core team.

Big factory return / intern onshore tips:Programhelp run with in a real battle

For SDE intern interviews like Microsoft's, the difficulty is actually not entirely in coding difficulty, but rather:

The interviewer dictates the requirements and you need to quickly understand and confirm them;
Time is sliced into three segments, and the pace of responses tends to get out of whack;
FOLLOW-UP questions may test the mind more than the original question.

We at programhelp have helped many trainees in this scenario to get returns and internships in big companies such as Microsoft, Linen, Google, Meta, etc. We have also helped many trainees to get a job in a big company such as Microsoft:

Remote and untraceable assistance: real-time assistance in the coding part to ensure correct solution and error-free implementation;
Real-time voice assistance: When you're stuck in follow-up, we'll remind you to write about violence before speaking about optimization without panicking;
Interview Coaching: Help you sort out your BQ stories in advance so you won't be confused when you're asked in an interview;
Full Process Coverage: From OA to VO and even Onsite, we have extensive hands-on experience.

If you also want to take an internship at a big company like Microsoft, Google, or Linen, you don't have to do it alone, look to us at programhelp for a solid landing.