Microsoft interview questions

Priority Queue Implementation

Implement a priority queue data structure from scratch without using built-in priority queue libraries. Your implementation should support core operations such as insert…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Mar 2026

CSV Duplicate Record Removal

Write a script to ingest a CSV file and remove duplicate records efficiently. Validate your approach using progressively larger test files, leveraging AI to refine…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Mar 2026

Design a Job Scheduler

Design a distributed job scheduler that can handle high-throughput job processing (10,000+ jobs per second), support both scheduled (cron-based) and ad-hoc job execution…

Companies: Microsoft, Airbnb, Apple, Autodesk +25

System Design

Last reported Mar 2026

Design a web crawler

URL frontier, politeness, deduplication at scale, distributed workers, failure and trap handling.

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, Atlassian +7

bloom-filters · deduplication · distributed-workers · dns

Last reported Mar 2026

Integer to English Words

Convert a non-negative integer to its English words representation. The core challenge is chunking the number into three-digit groups (ones, thousands, millions, billions)…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon

Math · Recursion · String

Last reported Mar 2026

Implement Tetris Game Logic

Design and implement the core game logic for a Tetris game, including piece movement, rotation, line clearing, and collision detection. Focus on the data structures…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Mar 2026

Regular Expression Matching

Determine whether a pattern p (with '.' matching any single character and '*' meaning zero or more of the preceding element) matches the entire string…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon

Last reported Mar 2026

Data Structure with O(1) Set All Operation

Implement a data structure that supports the following operations, all in O(1) time complexity: - get(key): Returns the value associated with the given key. -…

Companies: Microsoft, Cisco

Last reported Mar 2026

Word Ladder

Find the length of the shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord where each step changes exactly one letter and every intermediate word must be…

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Fan +5

Bidirectional Search · Breadth-First Search · Hash Table · String

Last reported Mar 2026

Design Splitwise

Design an expense sharing application like Splitwise that allows users to track shared expenses, split bills among friends, and settle debts with automatic calculations and…

Companies: Microsoft, Pine Labs

Last reported Mar 2026

Merge Log Streams and Verify Completeness

Given multiple log streams, merge them into a final log and verify that all entries from the original streams are present in the merged result…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Mar 2026

Minesweeper

Simulate a Minesweeper click on an m×n board: clicking a mine turns it to 'X', while clicking an empty square requires counting adjacent mines —…

Companies: Microsoft, Meta, Nuro, Uber

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

Last reported Mar 2026

Priority Queue Job Manager

Design a job management system using a priority queue that supports enqueueing jobs and retrieving batches of highest priority jobs. Each job contains an ID…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Mar 2026

Design a batch event ingestion system

Design a system that ingests large volumes of events in batches, handling concerns such as data validation, transformation, reliable delivery, and scalable storage.

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Mar 2026

Elevator System Design

Design and implement an elevator system that can handle multiple floors and optimize passenger transportation. Consider factors such as scheduling algorithms, floor requests…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Mar 2026

Design a ChatGPT-like serving system

Companies: Microsoft

LLM Inference & Serving · System Design

Last reported Mar 2026

Shortest Bridge

Given an n×n binary grid containing exactly two 4-connected islands, return the minimum number of 0→1 flips needed to connect them. The core challenge is…

Companies: Microsoft, Meta

Last reported Mar 2026

Describe one thing you have learned recently

Companies: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Reddit

Last reported Feb 2026

Design Google Calendar

Local-time recurrence, bounded free/busy queries, invitation state, and reminders that remain correct when schedules change.

Companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google +3

event-driven · idempotency · recurrence · scheduling

Last reported Feb 2026

Find Median from Data Stream

Maintain a data structure that supports adding integers from a stream and returning the current median efficiently for many interleaved addNum and findMedian calls. The…

Companies: Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, D. E. Shaw +4

Data Stream · Design · Heap (Priority Queue) · Sorting

Last reported Feb 2026

Meeting Scheduler

Given two people's lists of available time intervals and a required meeting duration, find the earliest time interval where both are free for at least…

Companies: Microsoft, Coupang, Uber

Last reported Feb 2026

Minimum Cost to Convert String II

Given source and target strings and a list of allowed substring → substring replacement rules with costs, compute the minimum total cost to transform source…

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Feb 2026

Shortest Path Algorithm Implementation

Implement the Floyd-Warshall algorithm to find shortest paths between all pairs of vertices in a weighted graph.

Companies: Microsoft

Last reported Feb 2026

Sliding Window Median

Given an array and window size k, return the median of each sliding window as it moves right by one. The core challenge is maintaining…

Companies: Microsoft, Meta, Spotify

Last reported Feb 2026

Tell me about a conflict you had at work.

The interviewer focused on a conflict that comes from different perspectives or ideas on how to execute a certain task.

Companies: Microsoft, Adyen, Amazon, Capital One +18

Last reported Feb 2026