Senior Frontend Engineer Oleksandr Kravchuk talked about his experience of going through five stages of an interview at Microsoft Corporation in 2026. In two days, the IT specialist went through four online interviews, each lasting an hour.
Senior Frontend Engineer Oleksandr Kravchuk talked about his experience of going through five stages of an interview at Microsoft Corporation in 2026. In two days, the IT specialist went through four online interviews, each lasting an hour.
Oleksandr Kravchuk is a Senior Frontend Engineer with over 8 years of experience in React and TypeScript, fintech, and enterprise development, based in Prague. He recently shared on LinkedIn how he interviewed at Microsoft.
It all started with a recommendation, after which the developer waited for feedback for several weeks until he was finally assigned an interview date.
However, a sudden illness ruined his plans. Despite his desire to “not miss a chance,” Oleksandr decided to postpone the interview. In his opinion, it was the right thing to do: “It’s better to come in an adequate state than to sit with your brain working at 40%.”
The selection process consisted of an online test and four hour-long interviews, three of which included live coding, and the final one was dedicated to testing values, motivation, and soft skills.
Each meeting had a clear structure: a short elevator pitch, discussion of real-world experience, live coding, explanation of the approach, trade-offs, and possible improvements to the solution.
First surprise: I expected the main focus to be on code. But a big part of every interview is real-world experience, behavioral questions.
Interviewers asked in depth about technical errors, team conflicts, difficult decisions, and situations where engineering decisions impacted users in production.
According to the developer, in such conversations, it was impossible to limit oneself to superficial answers about a quick fix for the situation - numerous clarifying questions demanded an honest analysis of the real impact and conclusions drawn. This made any attempts to invent an experience "on the fly" impossible.
And then, at the very first technical interview, the topic I was least focused on came to mind.
The technical part of the live coding was extremely intensive: only 20–25 minutes were allotted for everything. In this short time, it was necessary not only to understand the condition, but also to have time to talk about the approach, write working code, and justify compromise solutions.
An unexpected challenge was that two of the three stages involved a topic that the developer was completely unprepared for—tree structures. The tasks covered a wide range: from rendering nested structures in React to optimizing performance and handling edge cases.
This experience led the author of the post to an important conclusion: when preparing for a Frontend interview, "there will always be a topic you weren't prepared for, like trees."
"Frontend is not only forms, tables and buttons. It is also nested comments, tree view, markdown structure. Not to mention algorithms and graphs," the developer added.
Preparation for behavioral questions was thorough: the developer, together with the English teacher, formulated answers based on real experience, recorded them in writing, and practiced.
He strengthened his technical base with his own archive of tasks from previous interviews and analysis of questions on Glassdoor.
AI also helped in the process, in particular Claude, which, when given detailed context, proved to be more effective than other models, although in general the share of truly useful specifics from neural networks was about 20–30%.
The most difficult challenge was the grueling pace: after three consecutive stages, it was difficult to stay focused on the final conversation about motivation and cultural fit.
In conclusion, the author emphasizes that a Senior interview is much more than just writing code.
"My conclusion: a senior interview is not just about code. It's about whether you can think quickly under pressure, about clear communication, the ability to explain trade-offs, admit failures, and show real impact," the IT professional concluded.
His main advice to colleagues: "Don't just cook code. Cook your stories."
