Microsoft interview questions

Design a high-level logging system

Companies: Microsoft

Observability · System Design

Last reported Feb 2026

Design a RAG system with agentic tools

Companies: Microsoft

ML System Design

Last reported Feb 2026

Design read-heavy org chart subordinate counts

Companies: Microsoft

Data Structure Design · System Design

Last reported Feb 2026

Kth Largest Element in a Stream

Maintain the kth largest element in a dynamic stream: implement a class initialized with k and an initial array that supports add(val) and returns the…

Companies: Microsoft, Cloudkitchens

Last reported Feb 2026

Design a Calendar System

Design a calendar system that allows users to register, manage their schedules, and view other people's availability and free/busy times.

Companies: Microsoft, LinkedIn, Oracle

Last reported Feb 2026

Maximum Area Rectangle With Point Constraints I

Given up to 10 unique points with integer coordinates, find the largest-area axis-aligned rectangle whose four corners are among the points and that contains no…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jan 2026

Bitwise ORs of Subarrays

Count how many distinct integers appear as the bitwise OR of any non-empty contiguous subarray of arr. Key insight: bitwise OR only accumulates bits so…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon

Last reported Jan 2026

Rotated Digits

Count how many integers in [1, n] consist only of rotatable digits (0,1,8,2,5,6,9) and contain at least one digit that changes when rotated (2,5,6,9). This…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jan 2026

Design a live-stream comments system

Companies: Microsoft

Real-Time Systems · System Design

Last reported Jan 2026

Design a movie ticket booking system

Design a movie ticket booking system similar to BookMyShow that allows users to browse movies, select theaters and showtimes, book tickets, and manage reservations.

Companies: Microsoft, Circle, Nextiva, Payoneer

Last reported Jan 2026

Design a replicated cloud storage service

Companies: Microsoft

System Design

Last reported Jan 2026

Design a resource change tracking database

Companies: Microsoft

System Design

Last reported Jan 2026

Design REST APIs for JSON file storage

Companies: Microsoft

API Design · System Design

Last reported Jan 2026

Find if Path Exists in Graph

Given an undirected graph (n up to 2×10^5) as an edge list, determine whether there exists any path between the given source and destination vertices…

Companies: Microsoft, Meta, Whatnot

Last reported Jan 2026

How do you manage multiple priorities, do you like to be in a place where priorities keep changing or prefer doing the same thing repeatedly.

Companies: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Uber

Last reported Jan 2026

Number of Islands II

Given an initially all-water m×n grid, process a sequence of add-land operations and return the number of islands (4-directionally connected land components) after each…

Companies: Microsoft, LinkedIn, Uber

Array · Hash Table · Union-Find

Last reported Jan 2026

Recover Binary Search Tree

Given a BST where exactly two nodes' values were swapped, restore the tree in-place (without changing its structure) so it satisfies the BST property. The…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jan 2026

Tell me about a project where the requirements were not clear or kept changing. How did you adapt and maintain productivity?

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Bloomberg +11

Last reported Jan 2026

Validate Binary Search Tree

Determine whether a binary tree is a valid binary search tree by checking that each node's value is strictly greater than all values in its…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Lyft

Binary Search Tree · Binary Tree · Depth-First Search · Tree

Last reported Jan 2026

Copy List with Random Pointer

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, NVIDIA

Hash Table · Linked List

Last reported Jan 2026

Palindromic Substrings

Count the number of contiguous substrings of s that are palindromes. With |s| up to 1000, the core challenge is to enumerate/detect all palindromic centers…

Companies: Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Meta

Dynamic Programming · String · Two Pointers

Last reported Jan 2026

Design a browser history system

Design a browser history system that allows users to navigate back and forward through visited pages, search their browsing history, and manage bookmarks.

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jan 2026