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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 1591–1620 of 2810 results
- MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerImplement concurrent structures and debug queue code
This question evaluates data-structure implementation and concurrent programming competencies by testing construction of an LRU cache, a custom hash map, a quadtree spatial index, and debugging of a producer-consumer queue.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerImplement greedy decoding and beam search
This question evaluates understanding of autoregressive decoding strategies—greedy decoding and beam search—including cumulative log-probability scoring, beam maintenance, EOS handling, and sequence expansion logic; it is categorized under Coding & Algorithms for Software Engineer roles.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerIn-Memory URL Shortener: Encode and Decode
Design an in-memory URL shortener class supporting fast encoding and decoding between original long URLs and compact short URLs using hash maps.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screenhash-tabledesignstring - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerIntroduce yourself and explain 'Why us?'
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.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerList Point Pairs Spanning Non-Degenerate Boxes in N Dimensions, Sorted by Volume
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerMerge overlapping intervals
This question tests the ability to manage and merge interval-based data, requiring sorting and a single-pass linear traversal to resolve overlaps.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenSortingIntervalsArrays - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerParse a Signed Integer in an Arbitrary Base
Parse signed integers in bases 2–36 with explicit syntax, negative-boundary handling, pre-arithmetic overflow checks, and deterministic error precedence.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerReason About Alien Dictionary Ordering
This problem tests the ability to model lexicographical constraints as a directed graph and determine if a valid ordering of unique characters exists using topological sorting.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenGraphTopological SortHash Table - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerReturn Top K Open Businesses
This problem tests your ability to filter data streams and maintain a top-K collection using a priority queue with custom sorting logic.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenSortingHeapsFiltering - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerReturn a topological ordering of a graph
This question tests the ability to implement Kahn's algorithm or a DFS-based approach to perform a topological sort while correctly handling cycle detection.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenGraphTopological SortKahn's Algorithm - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerSolve Three Coding Interview Problems
This problem tests your ability to manipulate sorted data, optimize for mathematical properties, and implement efficient data structures for string prefix operations.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenArraysMathTrie - MicrosoftEasySoftware EngineerSolve binary-tree reverse printing and LPS
This question evaluates proficiency with tree data structures and level-order traversal semantics for reverse level printing, as well as string algorithmic reasoning and dynamic programming concepts for computing the longest palindromic subsequence, categorized under Coding & Algorithms.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftEasySoftware EngineerSolve four classic algorithm problems
This set evaluates proficiency in core algorithms and data structures: tree traversal and order manipulation (zigzag level-order), dynamic programming and subsequence reasoning (longest palindromic subsequence), numeric algorithms and search/approximation (integer square root), and positional numeral systems/base conversion (spreadsheet column to number). These problems are commonly asked to assess algorithmic thinking, complexity analysis, and handling of edge cases in the Coding & Algorithms domain, testing both conceptual understanding of underlying principles and practical application of implementation techniques.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerSolve power jumps and graph tour
This problem tests your ability to optimize minimal operations using bitwise properties and to determine the existence of a specific graph traversal path.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenGreedyBitmask DPGraph Theory - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerSort Three Categories In Place
This question evaluates proficiency in in-place array manipulation, constant-space algorithms, and linear-time partitioning techniques. Commonly asked in Coding & Algorithms interviews to assess algorithmic efficiency, pointer/index management, and reasoning about invariants, it focuses on practical application of algorithmic concepts rather than purely theoretical understanding.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerStream output until stop token appears
This problem tests your ability to process streaming data from a generator while detecting a multi-character stop sequence that may be split across data chunks.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenStringsStreamingGenerators - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerValidate a Hierarchy and Compute Propagation Time
Tests graph validation and traversal by requiring candidates to verify whether directed relationships form a valid single-rooted directed tree and calculate the maximum propagation delay from the root.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screengraphtreedfs - MillenniumMediumSoftware EngineerHow do you explain work to non-technical partners?
This question evaluates a candidate's competence in communicating complex technical or ML topics to non-technical stakeholders and their motivation for working on AI/ML in trading contexts, with emphasis on translating technical tradeoffs into business impact, risk awareness, and domain constraints such as latency, cost, and compliance.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - MillenniumMediumSoftware EngineerHow would you model stock price prediction?
This problem tests the candidate's ability to design an end-to-end machine learning pipeline for financial time-series forecasting, specifically focusing on the nuances of feature engineering and evaluation in a non-stationary environment.
Machine LearningTechnical ScreenTime-SeriesFeature EngineeringFinancial Engineering - Mistral AIHardSoftware EngineerBuild and design a Mistral RAG agent
This question evaluates a candidate's skills in building a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system, covering document ingestion, chunking, embedding generation, vector indexing, retrieval, LLM API-driven streaming completions, short-term conversation memory, and operational reliability features.
ML System DesignTechnical Screen - Mistral AIMediumSoftware EngineerCompare RMSNorm and LayerNorm in Transformer Blocks
Compare LayerNorm and RMSNorm equations, centering, shift behavior, hidden-feature axes, numerical precision, and the tradeoffs behind simpler normalization.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - Mistral AIMediumSoftware EngineerCompare Reward-Model RLHF and Direct Preference Optimization
Compare reward-model RLHF and DPO through preference data, policy objectives, reference regularization, training stages, and evaluation under distribution shift.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - Mistral AIMediumSoftware EngineerCompare Tensor Parallelism and Pipeline Parallelism
Compare transformer tensor and pipeline parallelism through parameter partitioning, collectives, activation transfers, microbatch bubbles, memory, and inference latency.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - Mistral AIHardSoftware EngineerCompute Remaining GPUs With Switching Limits
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to perform time-series aggregation, array manipulation, and constrained optimization for selecting resources across multiple clusters and days.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - Mistral AIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a PDF-to-Markdown Inference API
This question evaluates system-design and ML inference orchestration skills, assessing competency in composing multi-stage pipelines that manage heterogeneous resource profiles (CPU, GPU, memory) and trade-offs between latency and throughput.
ML System DesignTechnical Screen - Mistral AIMediumSoftware EngineerExplain AI coding assistant usage strategy
This question evaluates competency in responsible AI tool usage, ethical judgment, secure handling of sensitive data, attribution and licensing awareness, time management, and communication skills, and is categorized as Behavioral & Leadership with ties to software engineering practices and AI governance.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - Mistral AIMediumSoftware EngineerExplain Adam, AdamW, and Decoupled Weight Decay
Understand Adam moment estimates and bias correction, then compare gradient-based L2 regularization with AdamW’s decoupled weight decay and learning-rate interaction.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - Mistral AIMediumSoftware EngineerExplain Mixture of Experts and Expert Parallelism
Explain sparse mixture-of-experts routing and expert parallelism, including token dispatch, weighted combination, load balancing, overflow policies, and communication costs.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - Mistral AIMediumSoftware EngineerExplain the Forward and Reverse Processes of Diffusion Models
Explain Gaussian diffusion corruption, timestep-conditioned denoising, noise-prediction training, iterative reverse sampling, latent representations, and guidance tradeoffs.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - Mistral AIMediumSoftware EngineerKeep GPUs Fed with an Efficient Data-Preparation Pipeline
Diagnose GPU input starvation across storage, CPU preprocessing, batching, transfer, and synchronization, then improve bounded overlap while preserving data correctness.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
Microsoft
Millennium
Mistral AI