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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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Showing 1411–1440 of 2336 results
- MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerAssemble async stream reads into objects
This problem tests your ability to handle partial reads from an asynchronous stream and correctly parse length-prefixed binary data structures.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteAsyncStreamsBinary-Parsing - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerBehavioral: Delivering Under a Tight Deadline and Handling a Difficult Situation
A senior behavioral question in two parts: describe delivering an important project against a tight deadline, then a difficult work situation and how you handled it. It tests prioritization, scope negotiation, stakeholder communication, ownership of decisions, and composure under pressure.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerBehavioral: Long Blockers, Missed Deadlines or User Complaints, and Career Direction
Behavioral and career questions from a software engineering onsite: a time you were blocked for a long time, a project that missed its deadline or drew many user complaints, and your current focus, reasons for moving and future technical direction. It tests ownership, communication and a coherent career story.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerBucket Words That Are Letter Rearrangements of One Another
A coding exercise that partitions a list of lowercase words into groups whose members use exactly the same letters with the same counts, returned in a fixed canonical order. It tests efficient grouping over up to ten thousand words, handling duplicates and empty strings, and producing deterministic sorted output.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerCheck a Linked List Palindrome Without Mutating It
Check whether a singly linked list is a palindrome in O(n) time and O(1) pointer space without leaving it modified. Practice finding the midpoint, reversing the second half, comparing values, and restoring every link before return.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerCheck palindrome number and next palindrome
This question tests your ability to manipulate digits of an integer to identify palindromes and efficiently construct the smallest palindrome greater than a given number.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteMathStringsAlgorithms - MicrosoftEasySoftware EngineerCollaborating With Teammates Across Regions and Working From Home
A behavioral question about collaborating with teammates spread across regions and time zones and with teammates who work from home, followed by a request for a story that shows how you collaborate. It tests asynchronous communication, inclusive hybrid practices, and a concrete personal contribution.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerConvert a Hexadecimal Address to Dotted IPv4
Convert an eight-digit hexadecimal address to network-order dotted IPv4 with strict validation, optional prefixes, and correct high-bit handling.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerCount the Separate Land Regions in a Binary Grid Map
A coding exercise that counts the separate land regions in a grid map of land and water cells, where land cells connect only through shared edges. It tests systematic exploration of a two-dimensional grid, correct neighbor handling at borders and corners, and scaling to large grids where one region may cover everything.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerCount words in a document robustly
This question evaluates text-processing and algorithmic engineering skills, specifically precise tokenization rule definition, robust handling of Unicode and punctuation, streaming/large-file processing, unit testing for corner cases, and analysis of time and space complexity.
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)Onsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDebug a Numerical Underflow in an A/B Testing Analytics Repo When the AI Agent Is Wrong
An AI-assisted debugging exercise set in a multi-file A/B testing analytics codebase with five reported issues, centered on a numerical underflow that makes a sequential test stall on large experiments. It tests triage under a time limit, numerical root-cause analysis, and judging when an AI agent's proposed fix is wrong.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerDecode a JWT string without libraries
This problem tests your understanding of the JSON Web Token (JWT) structure and your ability to manually implement Base64URL decoding and JSON deserialization in a constrained environment.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteString ManipulationEncodingSecurity - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDeep-Clone a Hand-Built Doubly Linked List with an Arbitrary Special Pointer
Implement your own doubly linked list whose nodes also carry a special pointer to any node in the list, then write a deep clone without using a built-in list type or adding fields to the node class. It tests pointer handling, mapping nodes by identity, edge cases such as null or self pointers, and proving the copy is fully independent.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe handling ambiguity and resolving design conflicts
This question evaluates a software engineer's competencies in handling ambiguity, prioritization and delivery with limited guidance, risk management during migrations and experiments (including staged rollouts and A/B testing), and resolving technical design conflicts through stakeholder communication.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign A Low-Latency Product Price Update API
Prepare for a read-heavy product pricing system design interview where prices update infrequently but launch-page reads must be low latency. The prompt focuses on versioned price records, caching, bulk reads, invalidation, rollback, and consistency after daily updates.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftEasySoftware EngineerDesign Anonymous Product Sharing with Every-Nth Visitor Rewards
Design product pages and trackable sharing links with anonymous-visitor limits, atomic every-Nth rewards, recoverable redemption, and engagement analytics.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Chatbot Personalization Memory
This problem evaluates the ability to design a scalable, low-latency memory system for an LLM-based chatbot that stores and retrieves user-specific facts to provide personalized responses.
ML System DesignOnsiteSystem DesignRAGLLM - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Food-Delivery Proximity Search for Restaurants Within 10 km
A system design exercise to build proximity search for a food-delivery app that finds restaurants within 10 km of a customer, followed by hand-coding the core lookup. It tests geospatial indexing, read and write paths, partitioning, handling dense areas, and turning a design into correct code.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign User Re-engagement Notifications
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.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Dictionary for Heterogeneous Key and Value Types
Design a heterogeneous dictionary with explicit type-aware equality, hashing, collision resolution, variable-length ownership, resizing, and persistence boundaries.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Key-Value Store
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.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsKey-Value StoreConsistent Hashing - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Global One-to-One Voice Calling System
Design global one-to-one voice calls with device registration, signaling, accept/reject races, media negotiation, relay fallback, and mobile recovery.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a High-Concurrency Incident Ticket Correlation Platform
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.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsEvent-DrivenData Modeling - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a High-Volume Log Storage System with Live Tailing of Growing Files
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.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Lab Machine Fleet Monitor: Payload Dispatch, Hang Detection, and Remote Reboot
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.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a RAG Ranking Pipeline
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.
ML System DesignOnsiteRAGInformation RetrievalSystem Design - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Bike-Sharing System With Reservations and Live Tracking
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.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Role-Based Access Control System With Fast Checks and Bounded Revocation
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.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Secure Copilot API
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.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Shared Proxy Layer That Cuts Microservices' API Call Costs
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.
System DesignOnsite
Microsoft