Which level at Microsoft do you get with 2.5 YOE (includes 16 month internship in same position) with Azure?
Expecting an offer. I did an internship for 16 months straight. Came back to my company as Silicon Engineer 2 directly. Had great first year performance review on my first year of return. I am basically upper band of Eng2, on my way to Sr. Eng. Looking at levels.fyi, L61 is SDE2 which I suppose is on par with eng2 in silicon as well. Since I am top eng2 band at my company on my way to Sr. Eng, do I expect L62 at msft? What compensation breakdown should I expect?
From my exp 2.5 years will be L60 or L61 if you did well in interviews specially given that most of that exp was during internship. Microsoft would have no knowledge of your performance at your current company. They can only look at your interview performance. But getting promoted from L61 to L62 is not a big deal if you are good. Can happen in a year.
This is exactly my experience - joined at 2.5 YoE last year as an L61 (given very good feedback on interview) and was just promoted to L62. Getting L62 off the bat will be almost impossible with only 2.5 YoE barring exceptional circumstances. I would recommend OP focus on getting competing offers to use as leverage, msft will usually lowball and requires competing offers to raise offer to top tier level (for HW, they can't really do top tier in SW).