What candidates say the round looked like, summarised in our words, each linked to where it came from. Microsoft hasn’t confirmed these details unless the source says “Official page”.
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CoreAI intern final loop: a traditional coding round, an AI-assisted coding round and a system design plus behavioural round. In the AI round the interviewer said outright that the candidate’s use of AI matched what they were looking for. The loop still ended in a rejection, which the candidate put down to several small deductions in the other rounds.
An IC2 early-career online assessment, a 90-minute HackerRank link, that the candidate called insanely difficult. None of the questions were LeetCode-tagged, and the AI-assisted portion was, in their words, really only there to check your syntax.
The candidate could use any tool and model they liked, with their screen shared. The round was a low-level design problem, and beyond the usual design signals the interviewer wanted to see how they prompted and how well they understood what the AI returned.
Microsoft’s 30-minute technical screen for a new grad role was announced as AI-assisted: the recruiter told the candidate to use an IDE with AI for it. Another SDE2 candidate on a CoreAI team was told one of four loop rounds would be AI-assisted, with VS Code and GitHub Copilot as the setup, and the rest no AI.
SDE2 loop of 5 rounds, one of them AI-assisted coding. The interviewer let the candidate use any IDE; they used the HackerRank editor and switched to Claude. The task was a simple LeetCode-style load balancer problem, and they were asked not to paste the whole question into the tool. Knowing the algorithm already, they paraphrased it and told Claude to use two min-heaps. The interviewer cared most about their questions, debugging, spotting errors and re-prompting. The recruiter had said any AI tool is allowed and questions can stretch into systems design.
Microsoft’s dedicated AI-assisted coding round is a regular low-level design problem. You write the whole design in comments first, with pseudocode for the core parts, clear enough for an AI to follow. Once the interviewer is satisfied, you ask the AI to write the code and run it. Debugging the AI’s code and saying what you’d do differently earns extra credit. There’s no provided IDE, so have VS Code with Copilot ready on your own machine.