Software Engineer II at Microsoft. I work on M365 core services and agentic AI experiences @ Microsoft. Before this: about three years at Oracle in Bengaluru on CX Sales Cloud, mostly Java and Next.js. I left for an MS in Computer Science at Northeastern's Khoury College, spent eight months on co-op at Kyndryl in New York building microservices and a retrieval pipeline on Azure OpenAI. Four questions account for most of what people ask me: whether the masters is worth the money, how international students get callbacks, how much DSA is enough, and what OPT actually looks like once you're on it. I've answered each enough times over DMs that it made sense to put them somewhere permanent. Everything here is free. Worth talking to me if you're: • Two to four years into a job in India and running the masters math • Sitting on admits and choosing between schools • Six months from graduating in the US and not getting callbacks • Grinding LeetCode without a clear sense of when to stop • Trying to move from services or support work into product engineering Not worth it if you want: a referral, details about Microsoft's hiring process or anything internal, or reassurance that your profile is strong when it isn't.