Got rejected from MAI Copilot after 4 rounds, sharing the loop

Got rejected from MAI Copilot after 4 rounds, sharing the loop

Just heard back on my Microsoft AI (Copilot team) loop, 4 rounds total, rejected via the portal with the usual "not selected" message.

Scheduling was kinda chaotic going in, recruiter went quiet for close to two weeks after the initial screen before suddenly locking in the onsite. Phone screen was a top K problem, return the top K items by score with a distance tiebreak, standard min-heap approach once I got past overcomplicating it with a max-heap first.

Onsite coding round 1 was an in-memory DB, insert/update/delete plus a where-clause select with comparison operators. Took me a while to realize most of the difficulty was in satisfying their pytest harness rather than the actual data structure. Round 2 was CSV parsing and querying, had to handle quoted fields with commas inside them which was the real trap in part 3. Afterward it hit me that both of these felt a lot like problems from the OpenAI bank, wouldn't be surprised if there's some overlap on this team honestly, but that's just a guess.

System design was a Copilot re-engagement notification system, push notifications for inactive users tied to reminders mentioned in chat history.

HM round got rescheduled twice and the interviewer barely asked anything technical. Wasn't too shocked by the rejection given how disjointed the whole process felt.