Company Knowledge & Culture Topics
Topics covering understanding a company's business model, product portfolio, strategy, culture, values, leadership, and organizational dynamics for interview preparation and market research.
Microsoft Gaming Ecosystem Familiarity
Knowledge of the Microsoft gaming platform ecosystem including Xbox consoles, Xbox Game Pass, and cloud gaming services. Understand platform requirements and operational workflows such as store submission and certification processes, development kit and development mode workflows, and console compatibility and backward compatibility policies. Experience integrating with Microsoft cloud services for games such as Microsoft Azure and PlayFab for backend services including authentication, player data storage, matchmaking, leaderboards, telemetry and analytics, and familiarity with the software development kits and application programming interfaces used for cross platform integration. Awareness of cloud streaming considerations including latency and encoding constraints and how those affect design and performance trade offs. Familiarity with Game Pass inclusion criteria and business models, the metrics platform teams care about for discovery and retention, and how to instrument and analyze player telemetry for product decisions. Understand common patterns for cross play and cross save, account linking and privacy, platform specific achievement and social features, and the operational practices for patching, staged rollouts, and live services on Microsoft platforms.
Microsoft Business, Products & Culture
Understanding Microsoft’s business model, product portfolio, strategic priorities, competitive landscape, and corporate culture, including values, leadership style, and workplace practices; aimed at interview preparation and company-specific analysis.
Microsoft Role Understanding
Understanding Microsoft as a company and the specific role you are applying for. This topic covers Microsoft’s business model and product portfolio (e.g., Azure, Windows, Office, LinkedIn, GitHub), strategic priorities, leadership and values, and the culture that guides decision making. It also includes researching the role’s responsibilities and required skills, and how your background, interests, and career goals align with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization. Useful for interview preparation and market research.
Motivation for Microsoft and This Role
Explains a candidate's motivation for applying to Microsoft and for the specific role, including alignment with Microsoft's mission and values, appreciation of the company's products and impact, and a plan for contributing to the team and role.
Amazon Leadership Principles
Demonstrate familiarity with Amazon leadership principles and how they apply to program and project decisions. Explain principles such as customer obsession, deliver results, think big, and dive deep, and practice mapping your behaviors and examples to those principles when describing trade offs, prioritization, and stakeholder influence.
Microsoft Gaming Ecosystem Knowledge
Knowledge of the Microsoft gaming ecosystem including Xbox and PC platforms, platform services and deployment models, cloud services relevant to games such as Azure and PlayFab, subscription and distribution models including Game Pass, store submission and certification processes, platform APIs and controller support, platform specific testing and optimization concerns, and recent Microsoft gaming initiatives that affect developers. Interviewers may ask about experience targeting Microsoft platforms or implications of cloud and subscription services for live operations.