Key takeaways
Most Microsoft interviews include two to four conversations with potential teammates and cross-functional colleagues, each up to an hour, held over the phone, on Microsoft Teams, or in person. Microsoft says it focuses its interviews on six aspects of its culture, growth mindset, diverse and inclusive, One Microsoft, customer obsession, values, and manager expectations, plus four technical areas for engineering roles, and it recommends structuring answers with STAR(R), which ends on Reflection. Microsoft publishes no typical duration, so ask your recruiter.
What does Microsoft publish about its interview process?
Start with what Microsoft says it listens for, because it is the part you can prepare against directly.
Microsoft's interview tips page says that "for our interview process, we focus on these key aspects of our culture," and lists six. Growth mindset, described as true learners who acquire new skills rapidly. Diverse and inclusive, meaning being open to learning about your own biases. One Microsoft, meaning actively seeking collaboration and building on the success of others. Customer obsession, meaning learning customers' perspectives and building those insights into your work. Values, meaning respect, integrity, and accountability. Manager expectations, meaning how managers model, coach, and care.
Five of the six describe how you learn, collaborate, and treat customers, and the sixth covers how Microsoft's managers coach. If your prep consists entirely of algorithm practice, you are preparing for the technical areas and leaving this list to chance.
The same page also tells you how to shape your answers. It recommends the STAR(R) model, Situation, Task, Action, Result, and Reflection, and asks you to think about "how you have applied feedback, worked with others, and adapted your approach." Our reading is that the last R is the growth-mindset aspect turned into an answer format. A story that ends on what you learned is doing what Microsoft asked for.
For technical roles, Microsoft's technical interviewing page names four areas pulled from the engineering lifecycle. Problem solving, which it specifies happens inside a 45 minute round. Design. Coding, described as clean, concise, and bug free in your strongest language. Testing, explicitly including corner cases and security implications.
Testing is the one candidates skip. It is listed as a named evaluation area, and most people treat it as a courtesy sentence at the end of a coding round. Walking through corner cases unprompted is a cheap way to hit something the rubric asks for.
On values, Microsoft's how we hire page names respect, integrity, accountability, and growth mindset, and says it evaluates how you will learn, collaborate, and contribute across teams. The interview tips page puts it more bluntly, describing "being a learn-it-all instead of a know-it-all" as part of its growth-mindset culture. Growth mindset is genuinely part of the stated criteria. Neither page publishes a scoring band for it, so treat it as a disposition the interviewers are listening for rather than a scale you can game.
How many interview rounds does Microsoft have?
Microsoft describes seven stages from job search to hire, and the part you control runs from application review through interview to offer.
On loop size, Microsoft says most interviews include two to four conversations with potential teammates and cross-functional colleagues, each up to an hour. Nearly every prep site says four to five. The honest answer is that Microsoft's number is the only sourced one, and candidate reports skew toward larger loops, probably because the people who write up their experiences online are disproportionately interviewing for senior engineering roles at large orgs. Plan for up to five, and do not treat a three-round loop as a bad sign.
Format is worth flagging because Microsoft's own pages pull in two directions. The how we hire page says interviews may take place over the phone, on Microsoft Teams, or in person, while a link on the same page still describes an "entirely virtual interview process." Separately, Microsoft announced a plan for employees to work from the office three days a week, starting with Puget Sound-area employees within 50 miles of an office by the end of February 2026, with some groups allowed to deviate, per chief people officer Amy Coleman's September 2025 update. Whether that pushed interview loops back in person is something no source establishes. Ask your recruiter rather than guessing.
One more structural fact. Microsoft says it is usually unable to provide individualized feedback to candidates who are not selected for a screen or interview. It says nothing either way about feedback after a full loop, so ask your recruiter during the process if feedback matters to you.
What happens in the Microsoft recruiter screen?
Microsoft's how we hire page says that "in some cases, after reviewing resumes, the team might schedule a brief screening conversation to help decide who to invite for interviews." A screen is not guaranteed, and where it happens it decides whether you reach the loop at all.
Treat it accordingly. Practice a 60 second version of what you own, what you shipped, and what the outcome was, short enough to survive being written down and read by someone who has never met you.
Microsoft's how we hire page also states its expectations on AI use, in its candidate code of conduct, and it is explicit. Candidates are encouraged to use AI tools "responsibly and ethically" while preparing, as long as the result reflects their true capabilities. During assessments and interviews, candidates are expected to demonstrate their own skills without outside assistance unless explicitly permitted. Preparation with AI is fine. Assistance during the interview is not. That line is drawn in Microsoft's own words, so you do not have to guess where it sits.
What do the Microsoft technical rounds test?
Microsoft's published topic list runs across algorithms, data structures, system design and distributed systems, AI and machine learning, data science, and networking, and it explicitly calls that list representative rather than exhaustive. The topics move with the role. The four evaluation areas do not.
The practical read on the 45 minute problem solving round is that it is not enough time to solve a hard problem silently and then explain yourself. Narrate as you go. The interviewer is writing down what they observed, and unspoken reasoning does not make it into the notes.
For design rounds, scope out loud before you draw. System design interview questions covers the shapes that come up most, and the technical interview preparation guide covers the rest of the loop. Microsoft's interview tips page asks candidates to start by "asking clarifying questions and stating your assumptions" when solving a problem, so a design answer that opens by clarifying constraints and naming what is out of scope is doing what the company asked for before it touches architecture.
Behavioral material tends to be woven into technical rounds rather than isolated in a single behavioral interview, though this varies and Microsoft does not publish a rule about it. Raymond Chen's description of Microsoft loops notes that each interview assesses technical competence alongside initiative, ability to learn, and teamwork, which supports the woven model without confirming that no separate behavioral round exists anywhere.
What is the As Appropriate round at Microsoft?
Here is what is actually documented. In 2023, Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen wrote a glossary post on the term.
The AA was the final interviewer in the loop, typically a senior person in the hiring group. Originally the round was conditional, hence the name. That interviewer read the earlier feedback and decided whether the candidate was still worth pursuing, either running a final interview or sending the candidate back to the recruiter without one. Chen then writes two things that most guides omit. The As Appropriate stopped being optional, so every candidate now gets that interview regardless of prior feedback. And the term is no longer officially used, though you may still hear it informally from old-timers.
The version circulating on prep sites, where the AA is a separate interview scheduled one to two weeks later only if you clear the loop, contradicts the only Tier 1 source on the subject. The veto power framing has no primary source at all. Neither does the claim that the loop team votes and then the AA weighs in, which reads like Amazon's debrief process transplanted onto a company that does not document one.
What you should take from this is narrow. Chen's post describes loops where the final interviewer had read the earlier feedback, and it also describes loops where every interviewer plays that role and there is no special interviewer. Either way, assume later interviewers may know how earlier rounds went, and be ready to address a soft spot rather than hoping it stays buried.
Is the Microsoft AA round the same as Amazon's Bar Raiser?
The comparison gets made constantly and it obscures more than it explains.
Amazon publicly documents the Bar Raiser program. Bar Raisers are deliberately not on the hiring team. There are more than 3,600 of them. They are nominated, trained on the Leadership Principles, and shadow other Bar Raisers for anywhere from three months to a year before running loops. They facilitate the debrief and share the hiring decision with the hiring manager.
Microsoft documents none of that. There is no published training program, no selection process, no debrief role, no headcount. The asymmetry is the point. Amazon built a formal institution to defend the hiring bar and wrote about it. Microsoft has a piece of retired internal slang for an interviewer role that, in some loops Chen describes, every interviewer shares. The Amazon interview process and the Google hiring process are both worth reading alongside this one, because all three companies solve the same calibration problem differently.
That difference should change your prep. At Amazon, the Bar Raiser is a known role with a known rubric, and preparing for the Leadership Principles is preparing for that person specifically. At Microsoft, there is no equivalent secret round to crack. The six culture aspects on the interview tips page are what Microsoft says it focuses on, and nothing on its pages limits them to one round.
How does Microsoft leveling affect your interview loop?
Microsoft publishes no official level to title map. The ladder that circulates comes from community sources, primarily levels.fyi, which lists level 59 as SDE and 61 as SDE II on its Microsoft software engineer page and carries the higher levels behind further links. Treat any full ladder as community-derived rather than company published.
Candidates report that feedback is submitted against a specific level, and that the level can move as a result of the loop, including outcomes like a hire at 61 alongside a no-hire at 60. That is a reasonable thing to plan around and not something any company source confirms, so hold it loosely.
The practical implication is that vagueness about scope costs you money. If your examples do not make clear what you owned versus what your team owned, the person writing feedback has to guess, and guesses round down.
What is overrated
Grinding algorithm problems to the exclusion of everything else. None of the six culture aspects Microsoft lists is technical. Most loops are two to four conversations with people who will work alongside you.
Trying to identify and beat the AA round. Microsoft publishes no separate rubric for it, the term is retired internally, and in some loops Chen describes there is no special AA interviewer at all.
Timeline benchmarks from prep sites. Microsoft publishes no typical duration, and says your recruiter will share the timeline for next steps. The four to eight week figures that circulate come from aggregator content. Ask your recruiter about your specific req.
Reading the layoffs as a closed door. Microsoft eliminated around 4,800 roles in July 2026, about 2.1% of its global workforce, and redeployed more than 4,000 employees internally over the prior year, per Amy Coleman. Coleman was direct that "the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI," while noting AI is changing how work gets done. A company that redeployed that many people internally is still filling roles, and some of the candidates for them are already inside.
A prep plan that matches the rubric
- Write one story for each culture aspect, growth mindset, diverse and inclusive, One Microsoft, customer obsession, and values, adding manager expectations if you are interviewing to manage people. Use different projects, and end each one on the Reflection step of STAR(R).
- Practice narrating while you code. Silence costs you in a 45 minute round because your reasoning has to end up in someone's written notes.
- Build a scoping habit for design rounds. Constraints and out-of-scope first, architecture second.
- Rehearse a 60 second scope summary for the recruiter screen, with the level you are targeting stated out loud.
- Add corner cases and security implications to every coding answer, because testing is a named evaluation area.
- Run at least one full loop out loud before the real one. Reading answers is not the same as delivering them, and a 45 minute round leaves no room to warm up. Voice mock interviews score that half with measurements taken off your own recording rather than an impression of you, returning your rate of um and uh, your words per minute, and how often you hedged. Narration is a named part of this loop, so those are the numbers that decide what ends up in someone's written notes. If you would rather shop around first, seven alternatives sit alongside it in this rundown of mock interview platforms.
Where this is heading
Microsoft's process is less mysterious than its reputation. The company publishes the culture aspects it interviews for, names its technical evaluation areas, states its position on AI use, and publishes nothing about a hiring committee. Most of the mystique attaches to a round whose own name was retired.
That pattern is worth generalizing beyond Microsoft. As AI sits on both sides of every application, prep content is getting cheaper to produce and less accurate, and folklore now outranks primary sources on most company hiring queries. The candidates who do well are the ones who read what the company actually wrote down. For Microsoft, that starts with one page listing six aspects of its culture.
