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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 2221–2250 of 3640 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 - MicrosoftMediumProduct ManagerBehavioral & Leadership Fit at Microsoft
Practice Microsoft Product Manager behavioral and leadership fit questions covering self-introduction, proud project, motivation, PM responsibility, career plan, engineering partnership, communication, product process, deadline risk, failure, stress, teamwork, and change management.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumProduct ManagerBehavioral Focus: Collaboration, Customer Obsession & Influence
Practice Microsoft Product Manager behavioral interviews covering collaboration, customer obsession, measuring impact, and influence without authority. The solution uses STAR-L examples, metric trees, experimentation methods, stakeholder mapping, trade-offs, and common pitfalls.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - 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 - MicrosoftMediumSite Reliability EngineerBehavioral: a problem that stumped you, your peers and AI tools, and how you solved it
Behavioral question on hard problem solving: describe a problem that stumped you, your peers and the AI tools you tried, and how you got past it. It tests systematic debugging under uncertainty, judgment about where tools and colleagues fall short, resourcefulness, and turning the fix into lasting team knowledge.
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 - MicrosoftMediumData ScientistBuild and Defend a Baseline Model from a CSV
Tests end-to-end applied machine learning design on tabular data: framing the prediction target, eliminating data leakage, establishing a leakage-free validation strategy, selecting baselines and evaluation metrics, and planning deployment monitoring and rollback.
Machine LearningOnsiteModel EvaluationData LeakageMLOps - MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning EngineerCalibrate LLM output to match Word formatting
This question tests the ability to design an end-to-end system for enforcing strict structured formatting (e.g., Docx/Markdown) on LLM-generated text, focusing on constraint enforcement and reliability.
ML System DesignOnsiteLLMSystem DesignConstrained Decoding - 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 - MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning EngineerClean OCR data and build an LLM dataset
This problem tests the ability to design an automated pipeline for cleaning noisy OCR text output and preparing it for supervised fine-tuning of an LLM.
Machine LearningOnsiteData EngineeringOCRLLM Fine-tuning - 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 - MicrosoftHardData ScientistCompare CNN/RNN/LSTM and implement K-means
This question evaluates understanding of deep learning architectures (CNN, RNN, LSTM) and unsupervised clustering implementation (K-means), covering inductive biases, parameter sharing and receptive fields, LSTM gating and vanishing-gradient behavior, tensor shape reasoning, algorithmic complexity, initialization, and cluster handling.
Machine LearningOnsite - MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning EngineerCompare preference alignment methods for LLMs
This question tests your conceptual understanding of alignment techniques, your ability to evaluate trade-offs between stability and performance, and your approach to measuring model safety and utility.
Machine LearningOnsiteRLHFDPOAlignment - 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 - MicrosoftMediumData ScientistDescribe leading an ambiguous ML project end-to-end
This Microsoft Data Scientist onsite behavioral question asks the candidate to narrate an end-to-end machine learning project they led under ambiguity, covering problem framing and success metrics tied to business KPIs, data sourcing and privacy constraints, model selection trade-offs across accuracy, latency, interpretability and cost, offline and online evaluation with a real experiment design, stakeholder alignment with PM, engineering and legal, staged rollout with rollback criteria, and post-launch monitoring. It also probes influence and judgment: a strong PM pushback resolved with data, a disagree-and-commit moment, one honest failure with its root cause, and how reproducibility, fairness and ethics held up under time pressure. Strong answers use STAR-L and quantify every claim, from PR-AUC and p95 latency to cost per thousand predictions and the confidence interval on the business lift.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning EngineerDescribe motivation, ownership, and conflict
This question evaluates motivation, ownership, conflict-resolution, and leadership communication competencies, focusing on interpersonal dynamics and responsibility relevant to a Machine Learning Engineer role.
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
Microsoft