Microsoft interview questions

Showing 61–90 of 252 results

• Design Testing Without A/B ExperimentsMedium

  This question evaluates a data scientist's mastery of causal inference, observational study methods, metric definition, experimental design trade-offs, and failure-mode analysis when randomized A/B testing is infeasible.

  MicrosoftData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationTechnical Screen
• Design User Re-engagement NotificationsMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design end-to-end re-engagement and reminder notification systems, assessing competencies in system architecture, data modeling, scheduling and delivery pipelines, reminder extraction from natural language, user preferences, rate limiting, metrics, privacy, reliability, and scalability.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a ChatGPT-like serving systemMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a scalable, low-latency LLM inference system, focusing on request handling, KV-cache optimization, and horizontal scaling strategies.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Dictionary for Heterogeneous Key and Value TypesMedium

  Design a heterogeneous dictionary with explicit type-aware equality, hashing, collision resolution, variable-length ownership, resizing, and persistence boundaries.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Design a Distributed Key-Value StoreMedium

  Tests your ability to architect a highly available, horizontally scalable distributed key-value store, evaluating core concepts including consistent hashing, tunable quorum consistency, storage engine trade-offs, and failure recovery.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Global One-to-One Voice Calling SystemMedium

  Design global one-to-one voice calls with device registration, signaling, accept/reject races, media negotiation, relay fallback, and mobile recovery.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a High-Concurrency Incident Ticket Correlation PlatformMedium

  Design a scalable incident ticket correlation and management system capable of handling high-volume alert storms, maintaining interval-based status history, and performing asynchronous, idempotent incident deduplication and linking.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a High-Volume Log Storage System with Live Tailing of Growing FilesMedium

  Design a storage system that ingests a massive stream of log records into files and serves reads, including readers following files that are still being written. It probes partitioning, metadata for locating data across nodes, batching for write throughput, position-based live delivery, and the cost of long-lived reader connections at scale.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Lab Machine Fleet Monitor: Payload Dispatch, Hang Detection, and Remote RebootEasy

  Design a system that dispatches compute payloads to lab machines that poll for work and shows on a central dashboard whether each payload is downloading, running, completed, crashed, or hung. It tests agent design, hang detection, crash and hang logs, authorized reboot and power cycle, reruns after interruption, and refreshable machine inventory.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Product Search SystemMedium

  This question evaluates skills in designing scalable, low-latency product search systems, covering information retrieval, ranking model design, feature generation, data ingestion and indexing pipelines, and serving infrastructure.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a RAG Ranking PipelineMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a multi-stage retrieval and ranking architecture for a RAG system, focusing on balancing search accuracy, latency, and system scalability.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a RAG-based assistant serviceMedium

  This question assesses the ability to architect a scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, focusing on data indexing, retrieval strategy, and mitigating common LLM issues like hallucinations and safety.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a Real-Time Bike-Sharing System With Reservations and Live TrackingMedium

  A system design exercise for a real-time bike-sharing service where riders find nearby bikes, reserve and unlock them, and end trips by locking. It tests gathering requirements first, choosing location reporting rates, keeping telemetry writes off the transactional database, and making reservations correct under contention.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Real-Time Collaborative Document Editor with Concurrent EditingMedium

  A senior-level system design prompt asking for a browser-based document editor where many people edit the same file at once, similar to Google Docs. It tests concurrency control for simultaneous edits, real-time sync, durable storage with version history, sharing permissions, and how the service scales and recovers from failures.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOther
• Design a Retrieval-Grounded Local Sports News RecommenderMedium

  This question tests the ability to design an end-to-end RAG system for news, focusing on temporal data relevance, hybrid retrieval strategies, and mitigation of LLM hallucinations.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignHR Screen
• Design a Role-Based Access Control System With Fast Checks and Bounded RevocationMedium

  A senior system design question about a role-based access control system with roles, permissions, scoped assignments and inheritance, plus a permission check on every protected request. It tests data modeling, fast check evaluation, caching with a bounded revocation delay, behavior on failure, and auditing of changes.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Secure Copilot APIMedium

  This question evaluates proficiency in designing secure, multi-tenant API systems with emphasis on authentication and authorization models, token lifecycle management, threat mitigation (such as replay attacks, token theft, and misuse), access control across tenants and tools, and scalability and reliability concerns.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Shared Proxy Layer That Cuts Microservices' API Call CostsMedium

  System design question about a shared proxy layer that lowers what microservices spend calling metered API endpoints. It tests placement choices, response caching, collapsing duplicate requests, batching, quotas and budgets, safe retries for writes, failure policies and per-service cost attribution.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Ticketmaster-like ticketing systemMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a high-concurrency reservation system that prevents overbooking while ensuring fairness and low latency during peak traffic.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a To-Do List Service (CRUD, Auth, Rate Limiting, Caching & API Versioning)Medium

  This question tests the ability to design a scalable, multi-tenant To-Do service, focusing on API versioning, authentication, rate limiting, and data integrity.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a URL Shortener (High-Level and Low-Level Design)Medium

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed, scalable URL shortening service by addressing key generation strategies, storage schema, and caching policies.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a URL Shortening ServiceMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed, scalable system for mapping long URLs to short aliases, focusing on hash generation, storage strategy, and performance optimization.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Versioned Key-Value StoreMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a data structure that supports storing multiple values for the same key indexed by timestamps, requiring efficient retrieval of the latest value at or before a specific point in time.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design a Voice and Chat AI Receptionist PlatformMedium

  Design a multi-tenant voice/chat AI receptionist with approved knowledge, authorized actions, interruption handling, and real human conversation takeover.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Windows App Notification System While Working With an AI AssistantMedium

  A system design exercise to design the Windows notification platform that lets many applications post, update and display notifications, completed with an AI assistant. It tests component design, isolation between apps, user controls and load handling, plus how well the candidate prompts, refines and critically evaluates AI output.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a cloud console main pageMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of designing a secure, multi-tenant cloud console main page, emphasizing authentication, authorization/permissions (including RBAC and scoped roles), audit logging, end-to-end request flow, and scaling for low-latency and high availability.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a high-level logging systemMedium

  This System Design question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable centralized logging and observability infrastructure, covering distributed systems concepts such as ingestion, durable storage, querying/indexing, access control, and multi-tenant separation.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a high-scale URL shortenerMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, highly available URL shortening service that manages massive read-heavy traffic and ensures low-latency redirection.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a job scheduler ETL pipeline systemHard

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant job orchestration system capable of handling complex task dependencies, retries, and high-throughput data processing.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a live sports score search feature with near-real-time score updatesMedium

  A system design exercise for a sports app's search feature that returns matching games with live, continuously updating scores. It probes requirement precision such as an explicit update-delay target, relational versus NoSQL storage choices, live update delivery, and high availability during traffic spikes.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite