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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.
- 9403
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Showing 2251–2280 of 3640 results
- 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 - MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign a Product Search System
This question evaluates skills in designing scalable, low-latency product search systems, covering information retrieval, ranking model design, feature generation, data ingestion and indexing pipelines, and serving infrastructure.
ML 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 - MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign a RAG-based assistant service
This question assesses the ability to architect a scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, focusing on data indexing, retrieval strategy, and mitigating common LLM issues like hallucinations and safety.
ML System DesignOnsiteRAGLLMVector Databases - 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 - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Ticketmaster-like ticketing system
This problem tests your ability to design a high-concurrency reservation system that prevents overbooking while ensuring fairness and low latency during peak traffic.
System DesignOnsiteConcurrencyDistributed SystemsScalability - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL Shortening Service
This question tests the ability to design a distributed, scalable system for mapping long URLs to short aliases, focusing on hash generation, storage strategy, and performance optimization.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityHashingCaching - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Voice and Chat AI Receptionist Platform
Design a multi-tenant voice/chat AI receptionist with approved knowledge, authorized actions, interruption handling, and real human conversation takeover.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Windows App Notification System While Working With an AI Assistant
A system design exercise to design the Windows notification platform that lets many applications post, update and display notifications, completed with an AI assistant. It tests component design, isolation between apps, user controls and load handling, plus how well the candidate prompts, refines and critically evaluates AI output.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a cloud console main page
This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of designing a secure, multi-tenant cloud console main page, emphasizing authentication, authorization/permissions (including RBAC and scoped roles), audit logging, end-to-end request flow, and scaling for low-latency and high availability.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a high-scale URL shortener
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, highly available URL shortening service that manages massive read-heavy traffic and ensures low-latency redirection.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityCachingDistributed Systems - MicrosoftHardSoftware EngineerDesign a job scheduler ETL pipeline system
This question tests the ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant job orchestration system capable of handling complex task dependencies, retries, and high-throughput data processing.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsETLScalability - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a live sports score search feature with near-real-time score updates
A system design exercise for a sports app's search feature that returns matching games with live, continuously updating scores. It probes requirement precision such as an explicit update-delay target, relational versus NoSQL storage choices, live update delivery, and high availability during traffic spikes.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a pipeline that ingests a live data stream and powers real-time charts
A high-level design question about ingesting a continuous stream of timestamped events and showing it on dashboards whose charts update live. It examines stream processing, aggregation and downsampling, late-event handling, storage for recent and historical data, and the ability to present a design clearly without a diagram.
System DesignOnsite - 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 - 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 - MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign chat and online chess
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed system that supports low-latency, real-time interactions for both chat messaging and synchronized game state for a chess platform.
System DesignOnsiteWebSocketsScalabilityConcurrency - MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign email ranking and summarization in Outlook
This problem tests the ability to architect a scalable ML pipeline that balances personalized email prioritization with LLM-based summarization while addressing low-latency requirements and data safety.
ML System DesignOnsiteRankingGenerative AISystem Design - 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 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 - MicrosoftHardProduct ManagerEnterprise Process Management Tool Design
Practice an enterprise Business Process Management product design case covering user personas, jobs to be done, objectives, prioritization, MVP scope, workflow architecture, governance, integrations, compliance, observability, and success metrics.
Product / Decision MakingOnsite
Microsoft