Microsoft interview questions

Design a system that handles 100,000 requests per second with rate limiting per user and per IP. Walk me through your architecture choices

Companies: Microsoft

Design a system to sort huge datasets

Distributed external sorting: global ordering, skewed keys, bounded-memory shuffle and merge, and correct recovery from worker failures.

Companies: Microsoft, Google

batch-processing · data-skew · distributed-shuffle · external-sorting

Design Google Analytics

High-volume event collection with retry-safe counting, late-arriving session data, distinct-user queries, and tenant skew.

Companies: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Qualtrics

approximate-counting · event-ingestion · event-time · multi-tenancy

Design split wise lld question

Companies: Microsoft

Explain bias-variance and evaluate a classifier

Companies: Microsoft

ML Fundamentals · Model Evaluation

Explain Deep Learning to a 5-Year-Old Child

Companies: Microsoft

Explain KNN and PCA and key tradeoffs

Companies: Microsoft

Explain metrics, regularization, and ablation studies

Companies: Microsoft

ML Fundamentals · Model Evaluation

Explain normalization, regularization, CTR, imbalance handling

Companies: Microsoft

CTR Prediction & Ads ML · Neural Networks & Training

Explain SHAP and build an ML project

Companies: Microsoft

ML System Design · Model Interpretability

Explain SHAP in an ML System

Companies: Microsoft

ML System Design · Model Interpretability

Find the Index of the First Occurrence in a String

Given two strings, return the starting index of the first occurrence of needle in haystack, or -1 if absent. This is a classic substring search…

Companies: Microsoft, Bloomberg, Google, Meta

Boyer–Moore String-Search Algorithm · Knuth–Morris–Pratt Algorithm · String · String Matching

Find the kth largest element in an unsorted array

Companies: Microsoft

got asked binary search variation

Companies: Microsoft

House Robber

Given an array of nonnegative integers representing house values, find the maximum sum you can obtain by selecting houses with the constraint that no two…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Goldman Sachs

Array · Dynamic Programming

How do you choose a model?

Companies: Microsoft

ML System Design · Supervised Learning

How to deal with conflict

Companies: Microsoft

How would you build and evaluate a classifier?

Companies: Microsoft

Implement robust k-means from scratch

Companies: Microsoft

Jump Game

Given an array where each value is the maximum jump length from that index, determine whether you can reach the last index starting from the…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta

Array · Dynamic Programming · Greedy

Largest Rectangle in Histogram

Find the maximum area of a rectangle formed by contiguous bars in a histogram (given bar heights). The core challenge is determining each bar's maximal…

Companies: Microsoft, Bloomberg

Array · Monotonic Stack · Range Minimum/Maximum Query · Stack

Letter Combinations of a Phone Number

Given a string of digits 2–9, return all possible letter strings by mapping each digit to its phone-keypad letters — effectively computing the Cartesian product…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn +1

Backtracking · Hash Table · String