System designLast seen Oct 2026
Design a Logging and Data Ingestion System
Accept high-volume log streams, durably buffer them, make recent and historical data queryable, and tail newly arriving records to authorized readers.
Open practiceMicrosoft interview practice
Microsoft Interview Questions: Coding and System Design Start with verified evidence.
Practice from 247 Microsoft-tagged public coding problems, organized only by the stage, topic, difficulty, and recency metadata FastPrep can verify. The broader public catalog also includes 35 system-design exercises, 5 low-level-design exercises.
- Catalog
- 287 public practice assets (247 coding)
- Start here
- Use the stage named in your invitation
- Evidence
- OA · Phone · Onsite metadata, shown in context
OA practice path
Online Assessment
Build a timed implementation rhythm from prompt to edge cases. Problems are ranked by repeated public catalog sightings.
111 Microsoft-tagged Online Assessment problems available.
| Company | Problem | Difficulty | Public evidence | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
MIMicrosoft | Maximum Escape Game ScoreArrayHash Table | Medium | 6 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Minimum Non-Adjacent Selection CapabilityArrayBinary Search | Medium | 5 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Authentication SystemHash TableDesign | Medium | 5 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Maximum Valid Substring FrequencyStringHash Table | Medium | 4 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Maximum Reward PointsArrayGreedy | Medium | 4 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Minimum Cost K-Capable ModelsArrayGreedy | Medium | 3 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | K Most Recent Unique Request IDsArrayHash Table | Easy | 3 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Minimum Fuel Cost Between CitiesGraphShortest Path | Hard | 3 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | XOR MultiplicationBit ManipulationMath | Medium | 3 public reportsLast reported Jul 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Maximum Interactive Team SizeArraySorting | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Maximize Pipeline Throughput Under a Scaling BudgetBinary SearchGreedy | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Prepare NotificationStringGreedy | Easy | 2 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Shortest Board Length to Cover HolesSortingBinary Search | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Shopkeeper Final Price SummaryArrayStack | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Minimum Jump CostArrayDynamic Programming | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Maximum Decrypted ScoreArraySliding Window | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Minimum Team Size From Every StartArraySliding Window | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Maximum String OperationsStringGreedy | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | 0/1 KnapsackDynamic ProgrammingArray | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Maximum Score with Prime JumpsArrayDynamic Programming | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
Phone practice path
Phone Screen
Practice solving while explaining assumptions, tradeoffs, and complexity. Problems are ranked by repeated public catalog sightings.
| Company | Problem | Difficulty | Public evidence | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
MIMicrosoft | Least Recently Used CacheHash TableDesign | Medium | 4 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Retain Top K ValuesArraySorting | Easy | 4 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Deterministic K-Means AssignmentsArrayMath | Hard | 4 public reportsLast reported May 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Greedy and Beam Sentence DecodingHeapGreedy | Hard | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | 3SumArraySorting | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Arithmetic Expression EvaluatorStringStack | Hard | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Infer a Lexicographically Smallest Alien AlphabetStringGraph | Hard | 2 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Sorted Subsets of a StringStringBacktracking | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Top K Frequent ElementsHash TableHeap | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Employee Hierarchy Cycle and Depth AnalysisGraphDepth-First Search | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Most Visited String SectorsArraySimulation | Easy | 1 public reportLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Suffix Maximum Frequency QueriesArrayDynamic Programming | Easy | 1 public reportLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Lowest Common Ancestor in Ordered and Unordered TreesTreeDepth-First Search | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Rank Open BusinessesArraySorting | Easy | 1 public reportLast reported May 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Min StackStackDesign | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Apr 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Excel Training Data and Model Response AuditArrayMatrix | Easy | 1 public reportLast reported Mar 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Word Break II: All SentencesStringDynamic Programming | Hard | 1 public reportLast reported Jan 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Three Partition ArrayArrayTwo Pointers | Easy | 1 public reportLast reported Dec 2024 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Sort Tuples by Value and Then KeySortingArray | Easy | 1 public reportLast reported Apr 2024 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Target-Sum Pair with Two PointersArraySorting | Easy | 1 public reportLast reported Apr 2024 | Practice |
Onsite practice path
Onsite
Practice complete solutions and defend the choices behind them. Problems are ranked by repeated public catalog sightings.
| Company | Problem | Difficulty | Public evidence | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
MIMicrosoft | Least Recently Used CacheHash TableDesign | Medium | 4 public reportsLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Retain Top K ValuesArraySorting | Easy | 4 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Deterministic K-Means AssignmentsArrayMath | Hard | 4 public reportsLast reported May 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Build a Precision-Recall CurveArraySorting | Medium | 3 public reportsLast reported Nov 2025 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Greedy and Beam Sentence DecodingHeapGreedy | Hard | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | 3SumArraySorting | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Sep 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Infer a Lexicographically Smallest Alien AlphabetStringGraph | Hard | 2 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | 0/1 KnapsackDynamic ProgrammingArray | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Aug 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Merge IntervalsIntervalsSorting | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Apr 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Is Graph Bipartite?GraphBreadth-First Search | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Feb 2022 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Number of IslandsMatrixGraph | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Oct 2021 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Compute Population VarianceArrayMath | Medium | 2 public reportsLast reported Mar 2021 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Generate Fixed-Size CombinationsBacktrackingCombinatorics | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Match a Descendant Selector in a DOM TreeTreeDepth-First Search | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Capacity to Ship Packages Within DaysArrayBinary Search | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Copy a Doubly Linked List with a Special PointerLinked ListHash Table | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Amount of Time to Infect a TreeGraphBreadth-First Search | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | K-Second Message SuppressionArrayHash Table | Easy | 1 public reportLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Max Consecutive Ones IIIArraySliding Window | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
MIMicrosoft | Maximum Subarray Sum Across K ConcatenationsArrayDynamic Programming | Medium | 1 public reportLast reported Oct 2026 | Practice |
01 · Preparation plan
Connect algorithm correctness to service behavior.
The Microsoft catalog is broad enough to reward deliberate rotation. Start with a parser, move to a dependency problem, and then reason about state over time. Use the separate design collection to extend those implementation choices into service boundaries; do not treat the largest stage group as a prediction of your interview. This is a suggested practice sequence, not the employer's interview process. Your invitation and recruiter guidance remain the source of truth.
- 01
Parse before calculating
Use the expression evaluator to separate token recognition from operator precedence. A clear grammar makes nested input easier to reason about than a collection of special cases.
- Trace parentheses and unary signs before implementing evaluation.
- Keep tokenization, precedence, and error handling separate.
- Compare stack depth with the length of the expression.
- 02
Make dependency failures explicit
The employee hierarchy exercise is useful for distinguishing a valid tree from malformed reporting relationships. Explain why cycle detection must happen before computing a reliable depth.
- Identify roots, disconnected components, and missing parents.
- Use visiting states to distinguish cycles from completed work.
- State which depth convention your result uses.
- 03
Test state over time
Treat the authentication-system exercise as a contract for issuing, renewing, and expiring state. After implementation, use the public service-design exercises to discuss where that state belongs.
- Define behavior exactly at an expiry boundary.
- Test repeated renewal and unknown identifiers.
- Separate storage cleanup from authorization correctness.
02 · Broader technical practice
Practice beyond standalone coding questions.
These public Microsoft-tagged exercises cover additional technical formats. They are included only when a verified catalog record and a crawlable practice page both exist.
System designLast seen Oct 2026
Design a Personalized Recommendation System
Design event ingestion, candidate retrieval, ranking, and serving for a bounded personalized user-item catalog.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Oct 2026
Design an Online Tic-Tac-Toe Platform
Match two players and execute authoritative turn-based games through retry-safe APIs across multiple regions.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Oct 2026
Design an Authenticated Shopping Platform
Design a single-retailer shopping API whose login, session, cart, and order boundaries remain secure and retry-safe at scale.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Oct 2026
Design a Product Page Sharing and Rewards Platform
Design company-managed product pages with trackable share links, anonymous milestone rewards, and trustworthy engagement analytics.
Open practiceLow-level designLast seen Oct 2026
Design and Implement an Attack-Path Graph Domain
Model infrastructure assets and typed relationships, then validate and construct traversable attack paths.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Oct 2026
Design an Employee Attrition Risk Platform
Ingest HR snapshots, train an imbalance-aware attrition model, and deliver auditable explanations to authorized reviewers.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
Design a Lab Machine Fleet Monitor
Monitor a geographically distributed lab-machine fleet with timely health state, alerts, history, and partition-aware recovery.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
Grounded Document-Vault Question Answering
Design a permission-aware RAG service that answers questions over a large document vault with verifiable citations.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
Design an Event-Driven Notification System
Design a reliable multi-channel notification platform for a high-cardinality internal producer fleet, with durable event handoff, fair admission, provider isolation, and recoverable poison messages.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
Design a Desktop Application Notification System
Coordinate local desktop notifications from multiple applications with durable intent, user policy, bounded delivery, and restart-safe state.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
Nearby Restaurant Search Service
Design a location search service that returns nearby restaurants in stable distance order.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
Design a Cloud File Storage System
Design a Drive-like service for durable, chunked file storage, sharing, versions, and multi-device synchronization. Audit a first-letter photo placement plan and its database-cost drivers.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
AI Receptionist Voice Chat
Design a voice receptionist that conducts bounded conversations and hands calls to people or workflows.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
Global One-to-One Voice Calling
Design a globally available service for reliable one-to-one internet voice calls.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2026
Design Distributed LLM Embedding and Output Sharding
Shard very large input-embedding and language-model output matrices while controlling memory, communication, skew, and sampling cost.
Open practiceLow-level designLast seen Sep 2026
Design and Implement a Highway Toll Session Domain
Model idempotent vehicle entry and exit events, one open journey per vehicle, deterministic toll calculation, and a path to partitioned durable processing.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Aug 2026
Design a Ticket Context and System Status Platform
Design a high-concurrency service that connects a support ticket to related user tickets and the affected system's historical status.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Aug 2026
Design a Marketplace Product Search Service
Design a large-marketplace search service that filters by price and taxonomy, serves stable ranked pages, and safely incorporates versioned catalog changes.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Aug 2026
Design a Multi-Tenant One-Time Password Service
Issue, deliver, and verify short-lived one-time passwords while isolating tenant policy, abuse, and data.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Aug 2026
Design a Web Crawler and Inverted Index
Continuously crawl an allowed web corpus and build a fresh, deduplicated inverted index for keyword search.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Aug 2026
Design a Backend Search Engine
Design a multi-tenant backend that ingests versioned documents and serves low-latency text search with filters, stable pagination, and safe index rebuilds.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Aug 2026
Design a Distributed Expiring LRU Cache
Design a partitioned cache with concurrent access, per-entry expiration, and approximate local recency eviction.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Aug 2026
Design Grounded Local Sports Recommendations
Recommend timely local sports coverage with retrieval-grounded summaries, safe fallbacks, and measurable model cost and quality.
Open practiceLow-level designLast seen Aug 2026
Desktop Notification Center
Design a desktop notification center with ordering, dismissal, and per-application state.
Open practiceLow-level designLast seen Aug 2026
Design a Library Circulation System
Design and implement a library circulation system with titles, physical copies, members, loans, holds, extensible policies, and atomic checkout and return behavior.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Jul 2026
Design a Real-Time Multiplayer Game
Design a multi-region multiplayer game that matches players and runs low-latency authoritative sessions.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Mar 2026
Design SFT and RL for Consistent LLM Answers
Improve an assistant's factual and abstention consistency across equivalent prompts with reviewed SFT data, reward design, and independent evaluation.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Feb 2026
Design an Initial Video-Language Model
Design the data, temporal representation, joint training and independent evaluation needed to build a first video-language question-answering model.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Dec 2025
Design Intent Understanding While a User Types
Infer a safe, calibrated task intent from changing partial input without confusing intent with text completion.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Nov 2025
Design a Learned Candidate Ranking Service
Design an online ranker and its model lifecycle for caller-supplied candidates.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Oct 2025
Design RAG-Assisted Kusto Query Generation
Turn an analyst's natural-language question into a grounded, authorized Kusto query with a safe preview path.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Oct 2025
Optimize LLM Inference Across Model and Infrastructure
Improve the latency and unit cost of an existing streaming LLM service while protecting answer quality and safe rollout.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Apr 2024
Design Budgeted AutoML Model Selection
Automatically compare reproducible tabular classification pipelines, select a model, and enforce a finite search budget despite retries and worker failures.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Oct 2022
Design Website Classification with Crowd-Labeled Data
Classify websites from domain and page signals while measuring crowd-label quality and protecting minority classes.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Apr 2022
Design Learned Web Search Ranking
Learn query-to-link relevance from historical clicks while separating weak feedback, candidate coverage and safe online ranking.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Oct 2021
Design Semantic Ad Retrieval and Ranking
Retrieve and rank relevant text and image ads for a query while learning safely from sparse, biased feedback.
Open practiceLow-level designLast seen Sep 2020
Design and Implement a Thread-Safe LRU Cache
Build a bounded in-memory cache that preserves exact least-recently-used eviction when several threads share it.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Sep 2020
Design a Self-Driving Perception Model
Build, evaluate, and release an object-detection model for cars, bicycles, and trucks under severe scenario and class imbalance.
Open practiceSystem designLast seen Feb 2020
Design a Spreadsheet Next-Command Recommender
Predict useful next spreadsheet commands from an ordered session history without leaking future actions or exposing private workbook content.
Open practice03 · Evidence boundary
What “Microsoft interview questions” means here.
It means practicing transferable implementation, testing, and technical reasoning with public catalog assets FastPrep tags to Microsoft. It does not mean FastPrep has access to the company's assessments or any private interview bank.
Repeated public sightings and last-reported dates can help you prioritize practice, but they cannot predict the questions, format, or platform in a specific interview.
- Only Microsoft-tagged FastPrep catalog problems appear above.
- Stage labels and report dates remain visible as context.
- No official, private, leaked, or proprietary questions are claimed.
04 · Plain answers
Microsoft interview practice questions, answered plainly.
This page owns technical-practice intent for Microsoft. Hiring activity, timelines, and market signals remain on the separate hiring-insights page.
01Should I prepare only Microsoft assessment questions?
No. The available practice spans timed coding, explanation-heavy problems, and design exercises. Use assessment-labeled records for implementation rehearsal, then switch to dependencies and stateful APIs when your role calls for discussion. This is a software-engineering study path, not a guide to every Microsoft role or a fixed sequence of rounds.
02Is FastPrep affiliated with Microsoft?
No. FastPrep is an independent interview-preparation product and is not affiliated with Microsoft. The page uses FastPrep's public practice catalog and does not claim official, private, leaked, or proprietary employer questions.
03How are Microsoft problems assigned to interview stages?
Stage labels come from FastPrep's public problem metadata. A problem can carry more than one reported stage, and hiring processes can change by role, level, location, and date. Treat the labels as preparation context, not a guarantee.
04Which Microsoft interview stage should I practice first?
Start with the stage named in your invitation or recruiter message. If no stage is known, use the largest available set to build general problem-solving fluency, then rehearse explanation and testing separately.
05Does this page predict the Microsoft interview process?
No. Public catalog counts, stage tags, and last-reported dates can help prioritize practice, but they cannot predict a specific interview's questions, sequence, timing, or platform.
Your next stage, made concrete
Pick a problem. Solve it end to end.
Start with the stage named in your invitation, then use public evidence as context—not as a promise of what you will be asked.
Open the practice set