Microsoft system design interview prep
Enterprise-grade, cloud-scale and collaborative products.
Hiring processes vary by role, level, team and year. This is a general outline compiled from publicly shared candidate reports and company career pages, not insider information. The practice prompts are exercises in each company's product domain, not actual interview questions.
Interview process
- 1
Recruiter conversation
Background and role match.
- 2
Technical interviews
Coding and problem solving, sometimes with design questions depending on role.
- 3
Interview loop
A set of interviews with the hiring team, which may include design and behavioural discussion.
- 4
Decision
Team and leadership review.
What they tend to emphasise
Practice prompts
- Design a file sync service like OneDrive.
- Design a team chat and meeting platform.
- Design a multi-tenant identity and access service.
- Design a calendar with scheduling across time zones.
- Design a notification service for enterprise apps.
Resources
- Documentation
Microservices Patterns Catalog
Pattern language for microservices: saga, API gateway, CQRS, event sourcing and more.
IntermediateMicroservicesCQRSBy Chris Richardson · microservices.io
- Documentation
OAuth 2.0 Overview
The canonical guide to OAuth 2.0 grants, tokens and security considerations.
IntermediateOAuthAPI GatewayBy OAuth Community · oauth.net
- Documentation
Azure Architecture Center
Reference architectures, cloud design patterns and best-practice guides.
IntermediateMicroservicesCQRSBy Microsoft · Microsoft Azure
- Case Studies
Ads Pacing Service at Twitter
In this blog, we describe how we separate Twitter’s pacing system from the serving stack to an independent service.
IntermediateMicroservicesBy Twitter engineers · Twitter
- Case Studies
Agrarian-Scale Kubernetes (3 parts) at New York Times
A real-world engineering write-up from New York Times on microservices and Orchestration.
IntermediateMicroservicesKubernetesBy New York Times engineers · New York Times
- Case Studies
API Platform at Riot Games
Hello all, Leigh Estes, aka RiotSchmick, here. I’m a software engineer at Riot Games working in the Service Availability initiative. Our first article on the API covered our goals, the responsibilities of the Developer Relations and Develo…
IntermediateRead hereMicroservicesBy Riot Games engineers · Riot Games
Learning paths & practice
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