AI assisted coding interview experience - Microsoft SDE2
Interview Experience
Hey guys, I just had my AI assisted coding interview as part of the 5 round interview loop with Microsoft. I’ve looked for resources or experiences here and couldn’t find any while preparing for it, s
Full Details
Hey guys, I just had my AI assisted coding interview as part of the 5 round interview loop with Microsoft. I’ve looked for resources or experiences here and couldn’t find any while preparing for it, so I thought I’d hop back on and share my experience.
Actual interview: The interviewer asked me to use any IDE I’m comfortable using. I had issues with my vscode that week so I just used the hackerrank IDE and was switching between that and Claude. I was asked a simple leetcode style load balancer question in a hackerrank link like any other coding interview. I was asked not to copy and paste the whole question into the tool. I used Claude for my interview. Since I already knew the algorithm, I just paraphrased the question and prompted Claude to use 2 min heaps to solve this problem. And as I ran the code, the interviewer was mostly interested in me asking him questions and how I’m debugging, pointing out errors and re-prompting to fix the code. It wasn’t as daunting as I thought it would be.
Tips from the interviewer: He encouraged me to use vscode with the Claude plugin next time for other ai assisted interviews instead of switching between applications. (Although I’m confused how that would be helpful as we can’t run the hidden testcases in vscode🤷🏻♀️)
Expectations before interview: The recruiter set some expectations and gave me some examples before the interviews were scheduled. - We are allowed to use any AI tool of our choice including but not limited to GitHub copilot, Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT - The question could be much broader in range, and could extend to systems engineering. One of the commonly asked questions according to the recruiter was to rebuild GitHub, with the following example constraints/thought process (it’s just the basic system design thought process): • h/w or s/w limitations • distributed systems • performance, reliability, scaling • cache, traffic management • users, machines, amount of data
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a microsoft interview for a swe role during the oa round reported in 2026.
It covers the following topics: Heap, System Design .
Difficulty rating: Easy
Topics
More Microsoft Interview Questions
About Microsoft Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Microsoft. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Microsoft are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Microsoft interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Microsoft reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Microsoft Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Microsoft reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.