Microsoft interview questions

Give me an example of a time you committed to a group decision even though you disagreed.

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta

Last reported Aug 2026

Number of Islands

Count the number of islands (4-directionally connected components of '1's) in an m×n binary grid. This is a connected-components/flood-fill problem typically solved with…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Anduril, Apple +16

Array · Breadth-First Search · Depth-First Search · Matrix

Last reported Aug 2026

Design a Corporate Ride-Sharing Application

Design a ride-sharing application for corporate office cabs that allows employees to schedule rides, optimizes pickup and drop-off routes, and manages cab assignments efficiently.

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Aug 2026

Design In-Memory File System

Design an in-memory hierarchical file system that supports path parsing and operations like mkdir, ls, addContentToFile (append/create), and readContentFromFile, requiring you…

Companies: Microsoft, Anchorage Digital, Capital One, Coupang +5

Design · Hash Table · Sorting · String

Last reported Aug 2026

Top K Frequent Words

Count word frequencies and return the k most frequent words sorted by descending frequency, breaking ties by lexicographical order. The core challenge is combining frequency…

Companies: Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Robinhood

Array · Bucket Sort · Counting · Hash Table

Last reported Aug 2026

Count Occurrences in Text

Given a long text and one or more query strings, count how many times each query appears in the text (including overlapping matches). The core…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Aug 2026

Design a Top-K System

Design a system that efficiently retrieves top-k items (songs, videos, hashtags, etc.) based on user activity or engagement metrics within specified time windows. The system…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Atlassian, Bloomberg +10

Last reported Aug 2026

Shortest Cycle in a Graph

Find the graph's girth: given an undirected simple graph, return the length (number of edges) of the shortest cycle or -1 if none exists. With…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Aug 2026

Valid Tic-Tac-Toe State

Determine if a 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe board is reachable under normal play by checking counts of X and O and detecting winning lines, ensuring any win(s)…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Aug 2026

Design a logging system

Design a distributed logging system that allows applications to send log messages, store them efficiently, and provide search and analytics capabilities for debugging and…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Expedia +3

Last reported Jul 2026

API Rate Limiter

Implement a rate limiting algorithm that accepts a unique key, a time period in seconds, and a maximum call count, and determines whether additional calls…

Companies: Microsoft, Bloomberg, Intuit, MongoDB

Last reported Jul 2026

Design a High CPU Incident Response System

Design a system for diagnosing and resolving high CPU incidents in a distributed service cluster, including tools for identifying affected hosts, analyzing traffic patterns…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026

Give a brief overview of your background and what you've worked on the last couple of years

Companies: Microsoft, Tesla

Last reported Jul 2026

Intersection of Two Linked Lists

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn

Last reported Jul 2026

Tell me about a situation where you hit a problem that stumped you, your peers, and the AI tools — what happened, and how did you get past it?

Tell me about a situation where you hit a problem that stumped you, your peers, and the AI tools — what happened, and how did…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026

Tell me about a time you had runtime data indicating a system problem and needed to correlate it with a recent deployment or feature flag change to triage quickly, and how did you reduce time-to-resolution?

Tell me about a time you had runtime data indicating a system problem and needed to correlate it with a recent deployment or feature flag…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026

Tell me about a time you were assigned a task and were unable to complete it.

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026

Tell me about a time you were on-call for a large-scale customer-facing service and had to investigate and resolve an issue — how did you assess severity and coordinate engineering engagement?

Tell me about a time you were on-call for a large-scale customer-facing service and had to investigate and resolve an issue — how did you…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026

Parsing A Boolean Expression

Parse and evaluate a fully parenthesized boolean expression string made of literals 't'/'f', unary '!' and comma-separated n-ary '&' and '|' operators with arbitrary nesting…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026

Design a Code Vulnerability Analysis System

Design a system that receives GitHub pull requests via webhook, analyzes code for vulnerabilities using local APIs (Java, C#, Python), posts comments back to GitHub…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026

Design a Presence Service API

Design a presence service API that allows users to track and display online/offline status, activity states, and real-time presence information across multiple devices and…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026

Fix 5 Bugs in an A/B Testing Analytics Platform

EXP is a lightweight A/B testing analytics service with a Python/FastAPI backend and TypeScript CLI dashboard. Identify and fix 5 existing bugs in the codebase…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Jul 2026