Officially confirmed
What Microsoft says about its process
- 1Microsoft says most interview processes include two to four conversations with potential teammates and cross-functional colleagues, with the exact steps varying by role.
- 2Technical interviews are problem-solving based and assess technical principles, problem decomposition, strategic thinking, and role-relevant core competencies.
- 3Official engineering guidance highlights design, clean executable code, and candidate-owned testing, including boundaries, error conditions, security, and stress cases.
- 4Candidates are encouraged to ask clarifying questions, state assumptions, explain choices, and prepare specific examples of collaboration, results, and reflection.
Official sources
Last verified 2026-08-03. We update the page when official hiring information materially changes.
Role coverage
Roles this guide supports
Practice focus
Signals to rehearse
- Problem decomposition
- Coding and algorithms
- System design
- Testing and security
- Competency-based communication
Independent company-style practice
AI engineering scenarios relevant to Microsoft
These EngMock exercises are either original, based on public engineering themes, or adapted from candidate reports, which may be about other companies. They are not represented as official or leaked Microsoft interview questions.
Design Google Docs
Design a real-time collaborative document editor supporting multiple simultaneous users.
View scenario →Design a Distributed File System
Design a GFS- or HDFS-style file system that stores petabytes of large files across thousands of servers in one data center for batch processing.
View scenario →Design a Notification System
Design a scalable notification service that sends emails, SMS, and push notifications to millions of users.
View scenario →Design a Role-Based Password Validator
Design an extensible validator that applies different password policies to regular users, administrators, and super administrators, handles Unicode input, and rejects passwords on a forbidden or breached-password list.
View scenario →Maximum Value in Every Sliding Window
Given an array and a window size k, return the maximum value within every contiguous window of size k as it slides from left to right across the array.
View scenario →Architecture Deep Dive on Your Past Project
Defend the architecture of a real project you built, its constraints, trade-offs, failures, and how you would redesign it today.
View scenario →Design a Chat Application
Design a real-time chat application like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.
View scenario →Design Date-Range File Storage
Design a file storage and indexing system that returns exactly the files created within a requested time interval.
View scenario →Fewest Moves to Solve a Sliding Tile Puzzle
Given a small 2-by-3 sliding tile puzzle board with one blank space, find the minimum number of adjacent tile slides needed to reach a specified target arrangement, or report it is unreachable.
View scenario →Merge Overlapping Room Bookings
Given a list of room booking intervals, each with a start and end time, merge all overlapping or touching intervals into the minimal set of consolidated bookings.
View scenario →Minimum Time for Contamination to Spread
Given a grid where each cell is empty, clean, or already contaminated, find the minimum time for all clean cells to become contaminated, spreading one step per unit time to adjacent cells, or report it is impossible.
View scenario →Prefix Lookup Service for a Word Dictionary
Given a dictionary of words, build a structure that can efficiently count how many dictionary words start with a given prefix.
View scenario →Reverse a Segment of a Linked List
Given the head of a singly linked list and two positions m and n, reverse the nodes from position m to position n in place and return the new head.
View scenario →Validate Nested Bracket Sequences
Given a string containing round, square, and curly brackets, determine whether every bracket is properly opened and closed in the correct nested order.
View scenario →Validate the Binary Search Tree Property
Given the root of a binary tree, determine whether it is a valid binary search tree.
View scenario →Practice the underlying interview skills
Combine a live technical mock with the candidate-reported Question Bank, then use the evidence-based report to choose your next focused scenario.