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Software Engineer Interview Questions
Practice 9403 coding, system design and machine learning questions from 546 companies, sorted by role, topic and interview round. Every question has step-by-step hints, a code runner that supports 8 languages and an AI mentor; members also get the full solution walkthrough.
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- 546
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- 11
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Showing 3451–3480 of 5874 results
- MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerDesign a replicated cloud storage service
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, highly available object storage system by addressing metadata management, data consistency, and replication strategies.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsStorageReplication - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a replicated key-value store with quorums
This question evaluates understanding of replication, quorum protocols, data partitioning, consistency models, failure detection and recovery, and conflict resolution in distributed key–value stores.
System DesignOnline Assessment - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerDesign a simple API rate limiter
This problem tests the ability to design a distributed rate-limiting service that maintains low latency and high accuracy across multiple application server instances.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityCachingDistributed Systems - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerDesign a typeahead search service
This question evaluates competency in large-scale system design, including scalable data modeling, low-latency prefix lookup, ranking and personalization strategies, API design, caching, and trade-off analysis.
System DesignTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Ad Impression Reconciliation and Aggregation Service
This problem tests the ability to design a distributed, idempotent pipeline that reconciles inconsistent event streams into a consistent, aggregated state for billing and analytics.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsData PipelinesIdempotency - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Event Booking System
This question tests the ability to design a high-concurrency booking system, focusing on preventing double-bookings, managing seat availability, and ensuring atomic transactions.
System DesignOnsiteConcurrencyDistributed SystemsDatabase Modeling - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Online Tic-Tac-Toe Service with REST-Only APIs, Matchmaking and Multi-Region
Design an online two-player Tic-Tac-Toe service where clients may only use REST APIs, with online matchmaking, scalability and expansion to multiple regions. It tests server-authoritative game state, propagating moves without server push, race-free player pairing, and deciding which data stays region-local.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerDesign an image upload/download service
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in system design, distributed storage and processing, API design, scalability, security, reliability, and observability for production-grade services.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an online ticket booking system
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that manages high-concurrency inventory, specifically focusing on consistency models, race condition prevention during seat selection, and reliable payment processing.
System DesignTechnical ScreenConcurrencyDistributed SystemsScalability - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign and Implement a Worker Thread Pool with Futures and Shutdown
Low-level design and concurrency question: design and implement a fixed-size thread pool with task submission, futures that return results or errors, and graceful or cancelling shutdown. It tests lock and condition variable use, lost wake-ups, policies for rejected work, pool sizing and deadlocks between dependent tasks.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOther - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign cache with least-recently-used eviction
This question evaluates understanding of in-memory key–value cache design, eviction policies, and appropriate data-structure choices to achieve amortized O(1) get and put operations.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign device telemetry pipeline for real-time and batch
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems architecture, data engineering, and operational trade-offs involved in designing telemetry pipelines that support both near-real-time and batch analytics.
System DesignOnline Assessment - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign read-heavy org chart subordinate counts
Evaluates understanding of tree/graph data modeling, dynamic indexing, and consistency and concurrency control for maintaining aggregate subordinate counts under updates; Category/Domain: System Design.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign streaming error-log counting with moving average
This question evaluates understanding of real-time stream processing concepts such as event filtering, stateful per-service counting, sliding-window moving averages, late-event handling, scalability, and fault-tolerant state management for monitoring and alerting.
System DesignOnline Assessment - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerDetect Repeated Patterns in a String Sequence
This problem tests string manipulation, hashing, and the ability to detect repeating sub-sequences of a fixed length k across a stream.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenStringsHashingSliding Window - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDetermine most popular concert city
This interview question evaluates algorithm design, data structures, correctness, complexity, edge cases, and implementation details in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Determine most popular concert city states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDiscuss mutexes, memory alignment, polymorphism, idempotency
This question evaluates understanding of concurrency control (mutexes and synchronization), memory alignment and layout, object-oriented polymorphism, and idempotent operations, encompassing key Software Engineering Fundamentals and systems-level concepts.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerExperimentation Platform: Sync vs Async Validation, Latency Budgets and Health Checks
A senior experimentation-platform deep dive that asks which validations should block versus run in the background, how variant assignment stays inside callers' latency budgets, and which health checks catch broken experiments. It tests trade-off reasoning about online A/B testing infrastructure.
System DesignTechnical Screen - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerExplain OOP design and API rollout
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerExplain Platform Evolution, Ownership, and Career Motivation
Explain a platform’s evolution, your exact ownership, the trade-offs behind changes, and a concrete, professional motivation for the next role.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerExplain Python, Java, and Memory Management
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteJavaPythonGarbage Collection - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerExplain deadlock cases and how to prevent them
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerExplain hash map internals and edge cases
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnline Assessment - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerExplain owning and debugging infra modules
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.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerExplain the Most Complex Project You Have Delivered
Explain a complex engineering project through personal ownership, constraints, alternatives, execution challenges, measurable evidence, and lessons learned.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerFind Unique Zero-Sum Triplets
Find unique zero-sum triplets with distinct indices, deterministic ordering, careful duplicate suppression, and explicit time and space analysis.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerFind all balanced k in a permutation
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}.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerFind longest substring without repeating characters
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenSliding WindowHash MapString - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerFind lowest common ancestor in tree
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerFind max consecutive elements with sum below target
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
Microsoft