Microsoft Interview Questions

Microsoft Interview Questions

Practice 213 real Microsoft interview questions for 2026. Covers all top categories — Coding & Algorithms, Behavioral & Leadership, System Design, Machine Learning, ML System Design — across Software Engineer, Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Product Manager, Technical Program Manager roles. Real questions from actual interviews with detailed solutions. Microsoft interview questions on this page focus heavily on coding and design: expect algorithmic problems, implementation correctness and complexity tradeoffs, and end-to-end system thinking during on-site loops. Interview preparation should combine timed coding drills, low-level and distributed design sketches, and polished STAR narratives that show impact and collaboration. For Software Engineers you’ll see recurring themes like versioned key-value stores, secure Copilot APIs, RAG ranking and retrieval pipelines, CSV/query engines, calendar and meeting-optimizer systems, URL shorteners, and memory/Java/Python management. Data Scientist questions concentrate on SQL aggregation/top-earner queries, classifier design and evaluation, estimating impact without A/B tests, SHAP and precision–recall analysis. Machine Learning Engineers face top-K/top-elements, LLM data quality checks, model selection, caching/merge interval problems, and RAG systems with agentic tools. Product roles emphasize customer obsession, cross-team influence, enterprise process tooling, metrics, and ML pipeline stability.

213 Questions 1 Company08.03.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Implement greedy decoding and beam search

You are given access to an auto-regressive language model that can score the next token based on a prefix. Assume: - next_logprobs(prefix_tokens) -> M...

Coding & Algorithms
8
0
133 people solved
Feb 15, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Find maximum collinear points

This question evaluates understanding of planar geometry and algorithmic reasoning for identifying collinearity, including handling duplicate points a...

Coding & Algorithms
6
0
99 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Remove duplicates in-place from unsorted array

This question evaluates understanding of in-place array manipulation, duplicate removal, and algorithmic analysis under strict extra-space constraints...

Coding & Algorithms
8
0
86 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Compute product of array except self

This question evaluates understanding of array manipulation, modular arithmetic, and algorithmic optimization by requiring computation of per-element ...

Coding & Algorithms
2
0
42 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Implement a resumable data loader

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design stateful, resumable data iteration with deterministic shuffling and compact serializable check...

Coding & Algorithms
5
0
56 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Implement idempotent request handling with idempotency keys

This question evaluates understanding of idempotency semantics, idempotency-key handling, concurrency control, synchronization, and in-memory TTL-base...

Coding & Algorithms
5
0
43 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Easy
Data Scientist Locked

Traverse org chart level by level

This question evaluates understanding of hierarchical data modeling and tree traversal, specifically breadth-first (level-order) traversal and reconst...

Coding & Algorithms
6
0
45 people solved
Feb 9, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Populate next pointers in a perfect binary tree

You are given a perfect binary tree (all leaves at the same level; every internal node has two children). Each node has fields left, right, and next. ...

Coding & Algorithms
6
0
77 people solved
Feb 7, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Fill rooms with nearest-gate distance

You are given an m×n grid representing a building floor plan: - -1 = wall/blocked cell - 0 = gate - A large positive number (e.g., INF = 2^31-1) = emp...

Coding & Algorithms
6
0
58 people solved
Feb 7, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Extract stream prefix before stop token

This question evaluates streaming string processing, incremental substring detection across chunk boundaries, and memory-efficient algorithm design fo...

Coding & Algorithms
3
0
62 people solved
Feb 1, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software EngineerNew Grad Locked

Build a CSV Query Engine

This question evaluates proficiency in text parsing, data modeling, and implementing in-memory query semantics, including CSV parsing rules, type infe...

Coding & Algorithms
5
0
41 people solved
Jan 31, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Check palindrome number and next palindrome

This question evaluates understanding of numeric and string manipulation along with algorithmic problem-solving for palindrome detection and generatio...

Coding & Algorithms
7
0
63 people solved
Jan 9, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Validate a JSON-like string

This question evaluates parsing and string-processing skills, focusing on structural validation of JSON-like text including matching and nesting of br...

Coding & Algorithms
10
0
134 people solved
Jan 6, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Check palindrome and find next larger palindrome

This question evaluates proficiency in string and numeric manipulation, specifically palindrome detection and generation of the next strictly larger n...

Coding & Algorithms
4
0
44 people solved
Jan 3, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Compute shortest path in cyclic graph

This question evaluates understanding of graph algorithms and shortest-path computation in weighted directed graphs, including handling cycles, non-ne...

Coding & Algorithms
2
0
47 people solved
Jan 3, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Find longest substring without repeating characters

Problem Given a string s, return the length of the longest contiguous substring that contains no repeated characters. Input - s: a string (may contain...

Coding & Algorithms
3
0
65 people solved
Nov 25, 2025
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Find lowest common ancestor in tree

You are given the root of a binary search tree (BST) and two distinct nodes p and q that are guaranteed to exist in the tree. Task (BST case): - Find ...

Coding & Algorithms
6
0
56 people solved
Nov 19, 2025
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Count integer pairs satisfying 1/x + 1/y = 1/N

You are given a positive integer N (\(1 \le N \le 10^6\)). Consider the Diophantine equation: \[ \frac{1}{x} + \frac{1}{y} = \frac{1}{N}, \] where x a...

Coding & Algorithms
6
0
56 people solved
Nov 17, 2025
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Find shortest substring with n unique letters

Problem You are given a string s consisting of lowercase English letters and an integer n (1 ≤ n ≤ 26). Find the length of the shortest contiguous sub...

Coding & Algorithms
5
0
46 people solved
Nov 3, 2025
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Merge multiple sorted arrays using min-heap

Problem You are given k sorted arrays of integers: - arrays[0], arrays[1], ..., arrays[k-1] - Each arrays[i] is sorted in non-decreasing order. - The ...

Coding & Algorithms
4
0
51 people solved
Oct 28, 2025

Frequently Asked Questions

How hard are Microsoft interview questions for the roles covered on this page?
Microsoft interview questions are rigorous and vary by role and level: expect strong emphasis on coding and algorithmic problem solving for Software Engineer roles, systems and scalability thinking for senior engineers, and a mix of coding, statistics and experimental design for Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer roles. Product and program roles focus more on product judgment, execution and cross‑team influence. Difficulty scales with seniority and team scope, and many interviews test production readiness, tradeoff reasoning and measurable impact rather than only theoretical knowledge.
What does the typical Microsoft interview process look like and where do these question types appear?
The common flow starts with a recruiter screen, a technical phone/video screen, then a virtual or onsite loop of four to five interviews and sometimes a final 'As Appropriate' leadership review. Coding & Algorithms rounds predominately assess Software Engineers, System Design appears more for mid/senior levels, Machine Learning and ML System Design rounds target MLEs and Data Scientists, and Behavioral & Leadership evaluations run in every loop. Interview timelines typically span several weeks; the exact mix depends on role, level and the specific team’s product priorities.
How long should I prepare before interviewing at Microsoft and how should I structure that time?
Plan preparation by role: engineers often need six to twelve weeks of focused work, while Data Scientists and MLEs can be ready in four to eight weeks if they balance coding, statistics and model evaluation practice. Product and TPM candidates usually need two to six weeks to assemble clear case studies and practice stakeholder narratives. Start with fundamentals and timed problem practice, add system design and production-readiness review mid-plan, then run full mock loops in the final weeks. Include deliberate practice on explaining tradeoffs, telemetry and impact throughout your preparation.
What are the key technical themes to prioritize for Microsoft interviews by position?
Software Engineers: recurring themes include distributed storage and versioned key-value design, graph algorithms and 'tour' style problems, parser/tokenizer and CSV/query-engine implementation, memory/efficiency considerations and practical services like URL shorteners and calendaring. Data Scientists: focus on metric selection under asymmetric costs, SHAP/feature‑attribution, precision–recall analysis, experiment alternatives to A/B and SQL-style data extraction and aggregation. Machine Learning Engineers: expect LLM/RAG system design, quality checks for labeled/LLM data, precision/recall computation from flaky APIs, caching/merge-interval patterns and rigorous ablation and regularization analysis. Product roles: enterprise process flows, ML pipeline stability and clear north-star metrics.
What standout tips and common pitfalls should I know when preparing for Microsoft interviews?
Standout tips: write production-quality code with clear edge-case handling and complexity justification, explain monitoring, rollout and rollback plans for designs, quantify business impact and use telemetry when describing ML work, and practice crisp STAR stories that show ownership and collaboration. Common pitfalls: solving only the toy version of a problem, ignoring performance or reliability tradeoffs, failing to ask clarifying questions, giving vague evaluation metrics or disregarding data bias and safety in ML discussions, and not tying technical choices back to customer or business outcomes.

Explore more Microsoft interview questions

Jump straight to Microsoft questions for a specific role or category.

By role
By category
In-depth guides
Across all companies