Microsoft interview questions

Showing 121–150 of 252 results

• Explain OOP design and API rolloutHard

  This question evaluates object-oriented design and API release engineering competencies, covering identification of core domain objects, separation of orchestration from business rules, testability and extensibility of backend logic, and safe modification of public APIs including backward compatibility, versioning, testing, rollout, monitoring, and client communication, and it is categorized under Software Engineering Fundamentals. It is commonly asked because employers need assurance that engineers can both conceptually design maintainable, extensible systems and practically apply release processes and testing strategies to evolve public interfaces without disrupting clients.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Explain Platform Evolution, Ownership, and Career MotivationMedium

  Explain a platform’s evolution, your exact ownership, the trade-offs behind changes, and a concrete, professional motivation for the next role.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• Explain Python, Java, and Memory ManagementMedium

  This question tests your understanding of language runtimes, memory management strategies, and the trade-offs between managed environments like Python and JVM-based languages like Java.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Explain SHAP and build an ML projectEasy

  This question tests your conceptual understanding of SHAP values for model interpretability and your ability to design a robust, end-to-end machine learning pipeline for a real-world business problem.

  MicrosoftData ScientistMachine LearningTechnical Screen
• Explain SHAP in an ML SystemMedium

  This question evaluates a data scientist's competence in designing and operationalizing end-to-end machine learning systems in the Machine Learning domain, covering problem framing, label and feature design, model selection, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and model interpretability using SHAP.

  MicrosoftData ScientistMachine LearningTechnical Screen
• Explain Transformers and deploy an LLM safelyEasy

  This question evaluates understanding of Transformer architectures and practical LLM deployment competencies, covering attention mechanisms, token and positional representations, computational complexity, and production concerns like latency, cost, quality, safety, and privacy.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Explain a project deeplyMedium

  This question assesses the candidate's depth of ownership over a previous machine learning project, specifically testing their ability to articulate system design choices, technical trade-offs, and operational resilience.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Explain deadlock cases and how to prevent themMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of deadlocks, concurrency control, and resource synchronization in concurrent programming, testing competency in identifying the necessary conditions for deadlock, analyzing concrete scenarios including circular waits, and considering engineering approaches for prevention, detection, and recovery.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Explain hash map internals and edge casesMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of hash map internals and related competencies in data structures, algorithmic complexity, and concurrent programming within the Software Engineering Fundamentals domain, covering collision handling, load factor and resizing, deletion semantics, worst-case behavior, iteration order, and thread-safety concerns.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnline Assessment
• Explain metrics, regularization, and ablation studiesMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of classification evaluation metrics, regularization methods, and experimental design for component-level analysis in NLP and broader Machine Learning systems, testing competencies in performance measurement, regularization trade-offs, and causal attribution of model components.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerMachine LearningTechnical Screen
• Explain owning and debugging infra modulesHard

  This question evaluates ownership, debugging, and operational competence for low-level infrastructure components such as storage, distributed systems, and other reliability-critical infra, emphasizing reliability/performance goals, incident investigation, trade-off reasoning, and executional ownership.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen
• Explain the Most Complex Project You Have DeliveredMedium

  Explain a complex engineering project through personal ownership, constraints, alternatives, execution challenges, measurable evidence, and lessons learned.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• Fewest Distinct Values to Delete So at Least Half the Array Is RemovedMedium

  A coding question that asks for the fewest distinct values whose complete deletion removes at least half of an integer array. It tests reasoning about how often each value occurs, proving that a choice is minimal, and the exact meaning of half when the array length is odd.

  MicrosoftApplied ScientistCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Find Top K Largest ElementsMedium

  This question tests the ability to efficiently find the K largest elements in an unsorted array while managing time complexity constraints through heap-based or selection-based algorithms.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Find Unique Zero-Sum TripletsMedium

  Find unique zero-sum triplets with distinct indices, deterministic ordering, careful duplicate suppression, and explicit time and space analysis.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Find all balanced k in a permutationHard

  This question evaluates understanding of permutations, array range reasoning, index mapping, and efficient algorithm design for detecting contiguous subarrays that exactly contain the prefix set {1..k}.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Find common friends from directed edgesMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to manipulate relational data and reason about graph reciprocity, specifically testing SQL query formulation, aggregation, deduplication, and indexing for performance in the Data Manipulation (SQL/Python) domain.

  MicrosoftData ScientistData Manipulation (SQL/Python)Technical Screen
• Find longest substring without repeating charactersMedium

  This problem tests your ability to use the sliding window technique combined with a hash map to efficiently find a maximal subarray meeting a specific constraint.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Find lowest common ancestor in treeMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of tree data structures and the lowest common ancestor concept, contrasting use of binary search tree ordering with the general binary tree case while requiring algorithmic time and space complexity reasoning in the Coding & Algorithms domain.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Find max consecutive elements with sum below targetMedium

  This question evaluates algorithmic problem-solving with arrays, including reasoning about contiguous subsequences, handling sorted inputs and edge cases, and analyzing time and space complexity.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Find minimum cycle cost per nodeHard

  This problem tests your ability to identify cycles within a weighted directed graph and compute the ratio of cycle cost to node count efficiently.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Find pairs with the minimum absolute differenceMedium

  This question evaluates array manipulation, sorting-based reasoning, and the ability to generate ordered value pairs that reflect minimum absolute differences while handling ordering and duplicates.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Find shortest substring with n unique lettersMedium

  This question evaluates proficiency in string processing, frequency management, and algorithmic optimization for locating constrained contiguous substrings. Commonly asked in the coding & algorithms domain because it reveals how candidates reason about character distinctness and efficiency trade-offs, it targets practical application of algorithmic techniques rather than purely conceptual theory.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Find the Best Connected Strength for Every Tree NodeMedium

  Compute the maximum weight connected subgraph containing each node in a tree with +1 and -1 neuron weights using rerooting dynamic programming.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Find the Bugs in an AI-Generated URL ShortenerMedium

  Tests code review, debugging, and refactoring skills by identifying flaws in an AI-generated in-memory URL shortener and implementing a robust, thread-safe replacement.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Find the Lowest Common Ancestor in a Binary Search TreeMedium

  This problem tests the ability to leverage the Binary Search Tree (BST) property to efficiently locate the Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) of two nodes.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsHR Screen
• Find the Lowest Common Ancestor in a Binary TreeMedium

  This problem tests tree traversal techniques and recursion logic to identify the deepest node that is an ancestor to two specified nodes in an arbitrary binary tree.

  MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsHR Screen
• Find the Most Visited Track PositionMedium

  Determine the most frequently visited track position given a series of sprint endpoints by efficiently tallying overlapping intervals.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Find where two singly linked lists merge, given each as a sequence of node idsMedium

  Coding practice question: two singly linked lists that may merge into a shared tail are given as sequences of node ids, and you must return the id of the node where they first meet, or -1. It tests reasoning about linked list structure, linear-time traversal, and edge cases such as no shared node or one list being the other's tail.

  MicrosoftSite Reliability EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Greedy and Top-k Beam Search Decoding That Returns the Sentence ProbabilityMedium

  A coding question on decoding a sequence from a next-token probability distribution: implement greedy decoding, extend it to beam search that keeps the top k partial sequences, and return the chosen sequence with its overall probability. It also probes why long sequences tend to receive low probability and how decoding should account for that.

  MicrosoftSoftware EngineerMachine LearningTechnical Screen