Microsoft interview questions

Showing 181–210 of 252 results

• Insert Spaces to Rebuild a Sentence from Dictionary WordsMedium

  A coding question that asks you to insert spaces into a string that lost them so that every piece is a dictionary word, returning the smallest valid sentence or None when no split exists. It tests string segmentation with dictionary lookups, handling of impossible inputs, and a canonical tie-breaking rule.

  MicrosoftApplied ScientistCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Introduce yourself and explain 'Why us?'Medium

  This question evaluates behavioral and leadership competencies—communication, decision-making under ambiguity, stakeholder alignment, technical leadership, mentorship, and impact articulation—within the Category: Behavioral & Leadership for a software engineering role.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen
• Keep Stable Unique Column Names Across Schema ChangesMedium

  Maintain stable case-insensitive unique column names across additions, removals, reordering, reappearance, and natural suffix collisions, with independent table histories.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• List Point Pairs Spanning Non-Degenerate Boxes in N Dimensions, Sorted by VolumeMedium

  A coding problem that takes points in two or more dimensions, finds every pair whose axis-aligned box has non-zero volume, and returns those pairs with their volumes in a strict order. It tests careful pair enumeration, handling of flat or degenerate boxes, and deterministic sorting with tie-breaks.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Live troubleshooting: diagnose and mitigate very high CPU on a public-facing serviceMedium

  Live troubleshooting scenario for a senior reliability role: a public-facing service shows very high CPU, and you must keep answering what you would check next. It tests impact-first triage, separating traffic growth from per-request regressions, profiling, and weighing rollback, scaling, throttling and asynchronous queueing.

  MicrosoftSite Reliability EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Longest Single-Letter Substring After at Most k Letter ReplacementsMedium

  A string problem: given uppercase letters and a budget of k single-letter changes, find the longest contiguous substring that can be turned into one repeated letter. It tests efficient substring scanning with letter counts and careful reasoning about when a candidate substring stays valid.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Low-Level Design of a Logging Library Shared by Many ThreadsMedium

  Low-level design question about an in-process logging library that many threads call at the same time. It tests class modeling for loggers, records, formatters and output destinations, plus thread safety, the hand-off to a background writer, ordering, overflow behavior, failure isolation and clean shutdown.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOther
• ML Pipeline Stability & EvaluationMedium

  Practice diagnosing and stabilizing a time-series ML forecasting pipeline after online accuracy drops. The solution covers data ingestion, feature generation, training, serving, time-aware evaluation, segment metrics, baselines, online canaries, remediation, monitoring, and ML release governance.

  MicrosoftProduct ManagerProduct / Decision MakingHR Screen
• Maximize Equal Array Length After Contiguous Sum MergesMedium

  Determine the maximum possible length of two identical arrays formed by repeatedly merging adjacent elements of two given positive-integer arrays, or return -1 if impossible.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Maximize Points by Deleting Values and Their NeighborsMedium

  Tests dynamic programming and hash map aggregation to maximize points under adjacency constraints over a sparse range of values.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Maximize profit with bounded sell windowMedium

  This question evaluates proficiency in array algorithms, time and space complexity analysis, and techniques for bounded-range optimization and streaming adaptation.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Maximum Subarray Sum of an Array Repeated K TimesMedium

  A coding question that first asks for the largest sum of a non-empty contiguous subarray, then for the same quantity when the array is written out k times back to back. It tests subarray reasoning across copy boundaries, all-negative inputs, and sums that overflow 32-bit integers.

  MicrosoftApplied ScientistCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Measure Every Lake on a Map Tile, Listed in Scan OrderEasy

  Compute the area of every water body on a rectangular map tile, reported in the order a row-by-row scan first touches each one; tests connected components on a grid and avoiding recursion limits on huge regions.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Measure LLM Quality and Detect Hallucinations, Then Implement an Evaluation ComponentMedium

  A hands-on LLM evaluation exercise on measuring model quality, comparing prompt or model versions, and detecting hallucinations against supplied context. It also asks for a small Python groundedness scorer that flags unsupported sentences and aggregates a hallucination rate, testing evaluation judgment and clean, well-tested code.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerMachine LearningOnsite
• Median of Every Fixed-Length Sliding Window in an Integer ArrayMedium

  A coding problem that slides a window of fixed length k across an integer array and asks for the median of every window position, returned as floats in window order. It tests keeping the middle of a changing collection available as elements enter and leave, exact handling of even-sized windows, and overflow-safe averaging.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Merge multiple sorted arrays using min-heapMedium

  This question evaluates algorithm design and data structure proficiency, focusing on merging multiple sorted sequences and reasoning about time and space complexity for large numbers of arrays and elements.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Merge overlapping intervalsMedium

  This question tests the ability to manage and merge interval-based data, requiring sorting and a single-pass linear traversal to resolve overlaps.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Minimize Fuel Cost Across CitiesMedium

  Calculate the minimum monetary cost to travel between two cities in a road network where fuel is consumed per unit distance and can be stockpiled with unlimited capacity at local city prices.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Minimize the Largest Value When Picking at Least k Non-Adjacent HousesMedium

  Pick at least k houses from a row without choosing two neighbors, so that the largest amount in any chosen house is as small as possible, and return that minimum. With up to 100,000 houses and values up to one billion, the task tests reasoning about a min-max objective under an adjacency constraint.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Minimum Number of Rooms to Host Overlapping MeetingsMedium

  A scheduling problem that asks for the fewest rooms needed to hold a set of meetings given as half-open time intervals, where a room freed at a given moment can be reused immediately. It tests interval reasoning, correct handling of shared endpoints and duplicates, and an efficient solution for large inputs.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Minimum Ship Capacity to Deliver Ordered Packages Within a Day LimitMedium

  Given package weights in a fixed loading order and a number of days, find the smallest ship capacity that delivers every package within that many days, carrying one contiguous run of packages per day. It tests reasoning precisely about feasibility, choosing correct bounds and handling large inputs efficiently.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Minimum total cost to convert one string into another using weighted character rulesMedium

  A string transformation problem: convert a source string into a target string using directed, weighted character replacement rules that may be chained at a position. It tests reasoning about multi-step conversions, choosing the cheapest of duplicate rules, detecting impossible positions, and totals beyond the 32-bit range.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOther
• Most Frequent Substring Under Distinct-Letter and Length LimitsMedium

  Find how often the most frequent eligible substring appears in a lowercase string, where an eligible substring has a length within a given range and no more than a set number of distinct letters. Overlapping occurrences count and inputs reach 100,000 characters, so the task tests efficient substring counting.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Most Frequent Substring Within a Length Range and a Distinct-Letter LimitMedium

  A string coding problem: among all substrings whose length falls in a given range and that use at most a given number of distinct letters, return how many times the most frequent one occurs. It tests handling overlapping occurrences and the distinct-letter limit, counting efficiently on strings of up to 100,000 characters, and returning zero when nothing qualifies.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• North Star Metrics & Experiment DesignMedium

  Practice defining a North Star Metric and experiment for a Microsoft product using Teams as the example. The solution defines Weekly Actively Collaborating Users, leading indicators with SQL sketches, telemetry requirements, randomization unit, experiment metrics, guardrails, power, and analysis.

  MicrosoftProduct ManagerProduct / Decision MakingHR Screen
• On-call behavioral: judging severity, escalating, and tracing an issue to a recent changeMedium

  Behavioral incident-response question for a senior reliability role: describe an on-call incident on a large customer-facing service and how you judged severity and escalated, then a case where you tied runtime signals to a recent deployment or feature flag change. It tests triage judgment, coordination and reducing time to resolution.

  MicrosoftSite Reliability EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• Parse a Signed Integer in an Arbitrary BaseMedium

  Parse signed integers in bases 2–36 with explicit syntax, negative-boundary handling, pre-arithmetic overflow checks, and deterministic error precedence.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Peer-to-Peer File Distribution: Discovery, Chunked Transfer and Integrity ChecksMedium

  A system design interview question asking you to build a peer-to-peer file sharing network where users download large files directly from other users. It tests content identification, peer discovery, chunked parallel transfer with integrity checks, NAT traversal, incentives against free-riders, and keeping files available as peers churn.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Populate next pointers in a perfect binary treeMedium

  Evaluates proficiency in tree traversal and in-place pointer manipulation, emphasizing the perfect binary tree invariant and space-time trade-offs; category/domain: Coding & Algorithms. It is commonly asked because it tests ability to perform level-wise linking under an O(1) extra-space constraint and operates at the implementation-level of algorithms and data structures.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Predict Employee Attrition from an HR Dataset and Explain Its DriversMedium

  A machine learning design exercise: given a tab-separated HR dataset with features such as age, job role, monthly income and overtime, predict which employees will leave and explain which factors drive attrition. It covers feature processing, model choice, class imbalance, evaluation metrics, threshold selection and interpretability.

  MicrosoftApplied ScientistML System DesignOnsite