Microsoft interview questions

Longest Palindromic Substring

Given a string s, return the longest substring that reads the same forwards and backwards. The core challenge is efficiently finding palindromic spans around centers…

Companies: Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, Bloomberg +6

Dynamic Programming · Manacher · String · Two Pointers

Longest Repeating Character Replacement

Find the length of the longest substring that can be turned into all the same letter by performing at most k character replacements; this is…

Companies: Microsoft, D. E. Shaw, Goldman Sachs, Meta +1

Hash Table · Sliding Window · String

Longest Valid Parentheses

Find the length of the longest well-formed (balanced) parentheses substring in a string of '(' and ')', handling nested and adjacent valid segments; this typically…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Uber

Bracket Sequences · Dynamic Programming · Stack · String

LRU Cache System Design LLD

LRU Cache System Design LLD

Companies: Microsoft

Maximum Bitwise XOR After Rearrangement

Companies: Microsoft

Bit Manipulation · Greedy · String

Maximum Capacity Within Budget

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon

Array · Binary Search · Sorting · Two Pointers

Maximum Nesting Depth of Two Valid Parentheses Strings

Given a valid parentheses string, assign each character to one of two disjoint valid-parentheses subsequences A and B (output 0/1 per index) so that the…

Companies: Microsoft

Bracket Sequences · Stack · String

Maximum Number of Items From Sale I

Companies: Microsoft

Array · Dynamic Programming · Greedy

Maximum Number of Occurrences of a Substring

Find the substring (overlaps allowed) that occurs most often in s among those with length between minSize and maxSize and at most maxLetters distinct characters…

Companies: Microsoft, Chewy, LinkedIn

Hash Table · Sliding Window · String

Maximum Path Score in a Grid

Companies: Microsoft, Google

Array · Dynamic Programming · Matrix

Maximum Subgraph Score in a Tree

Companies: Microsoft

Array · Depth-First Search · Dynamic Programming · Tree

Merge Intervals

Given a list of intervals, merge all overlapping (including touching endpoints) intervals and return the minimal set of non-overlapping intervals that cover them. Key pattern…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Antithesis, Apple +16

Array · Quicksort · Sorting

Merge Two Sorted Lists

Companies: Microsoft, Adobe, Google, LinkedIn +2

Linked List · Recursion

Minimum Absolute Distance Between Mirror Pairs

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta

Array · Hash Table · Math

Minimum Add to Make Parentheses Valid

Given a string of '(' and ')', return the minimum number of parentheses insertions needed to make the string valid. This is solved greedily by…

Companies: Microsoft, Meta

Bracket Sequences · Greedy · Stack · String

Minimum Difficulty of a Job Schedule

Partition the ordered list of jobs into d contiguous days (at least one job per day) to minimize the sum of daily difficulties, where each…

Companies: Microsoft, Atlassian

Array · Dynamic Programming

Minimum Distance Between Three Equal Elements II

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Google

Array · Hash Table

Next Permutation

Rearrange the array in-place to produce the lexicographically next greater permutation (using only O(1) extra space); if no larger permutation exists, reorder it to the…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, Meta

Array · Two Pointers

Number of ZigZag Arrays I

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, Google +1

Dynamic Programming · Prefix Sum

Oop question where you define object and and afunction

Companies: Microsoft

Palindrome Linked List

Companies: Microsoft, eBay, Meta

Linked List · Recursion · Stack · Two Pointers

Palindrome Number

Determine whether an integer's digit sequence reads the same forwards and backwards (return false for negative numbers); the follow-up asks to do this without converting…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, Google +1

Math