Microsoft interview questions

Build and Defend a Baseline Model from a CSV

Companies: Microsoft

AI-Assisted Development · Model Evaluation

Can't remember, but think leetcode easy-medium

Companies: Microsoft

Clean OCR data and build an LLM dataset

Companies: Microsoft

Annotation & Label Quality · Data Cleaning & Wrangling

Climbing Stairs

Count the number of distinct sequences of 1- or 2-step moves that sum to n — the ways follow the recurrence ways(n)=ways(n-1)+ways(n-2) (i.e., Fibonacci-like), with…

Companies: Microsoft, Bloomberg, Google, Intuit +1

Dynamic Programming · Math · Memoization

Combine Two Tables

Return each person's first and last name along with their city and state by performing a left join of Person with Address on personId, showing…

Companies: Microsoft, Google, Meta

Database

Compare CNN, RNN, and LSTM rigorously

Companies: Microsoft

Compare CNN/RNN/LSTM and implement K-means

Companies: Microsoft

Computer Vision · ML Coding

Compare preference alignment methods for LLMs

Companies: Microsoft

AI Safety & Alignment · Fine-Tuning & Alignment Techniques

Compute and plot a precision–recall curve

Companies: Microsoft

ML Coding · Model Evaluation

Concatenate Non-Zero Digits and Multiply by Sum I

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta

Math

Consecutive Numbers Sum

Count how many ways a given n (1 ≤ n ≤ 10^9) can be written as a sum of consecutive positive integers. The core challenge…

Companies: Microsoft, Meta

Enumeration · Math

Construct Uniform Parity Array I

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Amdocs, Google +1

Array · Math

Container With Most Water

Given heights of vertical lines at unit-spaced x-coordinates, pick two indices i<j to maximize the area min(height[i],height[j])*(j-i). With n up to 1e5, the problem requires…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, Cisco +4

Array · Greedy · Two Pointers

Count Commas in Range II

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta

Math

Count Good Subarrays

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, BNY Mellon, Harness

Array · Bit Manipulation · Monotonic Stack · Stack

Count Non Decreasing Arrays With Given Digit Sums

Companies: Microsoft

Array · Dynamic Programming · Prefix Sum

Count Residue Prefixes

Companies: Microsoft, Google

Hash Table · String

Count Routes to Climb a Rectangular Grid

Companies: Microsoft

Array · Dynamic Programming · Matrix · Prefix Sum

Count Subarrays With Majority Element I

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, Google +1

Array · Counting · Divide and Conquer · Hash Table

Count Subarrays With Majority Element II

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon

Array · Divide and Conquer · Hash Table · Merge Sort

Describe your background going into detial in each role

Companies: Microsoft

Design a distributed job scheduler

Durable timed execution: recurring occurrences, reliable dispatch, worker leases, retries, and duplicate side effects.

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Atlassian, DoorDash +3

backpressure · durable-queues · fault-tolerance · idempotency