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Microsoft mock interview practice for every round.
A Microsoft mock interview with Remy helps you rehearse a full loop. Candidates commonly report a mix of coding, design and behavioral conversations, often shaped by the team you are interviewing with.
What Microsoft interviews commonly test
Coding fundamentals
Arrays, strings, trees and graphs, with a clear explanation of the approach and its cost.
Design conversations
How you would build a service or a component for the team’s product, and why.
Growth and collaboration
Stories about learning something new, handling a failure and working across teams.
Practise the Microsoft loop with Remy.
Start from the job post
Paste the Microsoft job post or upload the PDF. We pick up the level and likely topics, and space rounds out before your interview date.
The Microsoft question pool
Rounds draw on the questions below. When we have recent reports from Microsoft candidates, Remy frames the question the way they described it.
A loop, not a single round
Mix coding, system design and behavioral rounds into a plan that counts down to your onsite, then redo the moments that slipped.
Say the trade-off before you start coding.
“I'll just use a hash map and sort it, it's probably fine.”11:40 · right before you started typing
“A heap keeps this at n log k. Sorting everything is simpler — I'll start there and say why it's fine for this input.”
36 questions in the Microsoft practice pool
Rounds for a Microsoft interview draw on these questions from our library. They are practice questions, not a list of questions Microsoft has asked.
Coding
14 questionsMin stack
Warm-upstackmin stackdesignRun-length string compression
Warm-upstringsrun length encodingtwo pointersMerge intervals
Warm-upintervalssortinggreedyTwo-sum pairs with duplicates
Standardtwo sumhash maptwo pointersLRU cache
Standardlru cachehash maplinked listBinary tree level order
Standardbinary treebfsqueueMost frequent values
Standardheaptop kcountingConnected components in a graph
StandardgraphdfsbfsSearch a rotated sorted array
Standardbinary searcharraysrotated arrayLongest substring without repeats
Standardsliding windowstringshash mapPrefix tree
StandardtriestringsdesignFewest coins for an amount
Standarddynamic programmingcoinsbottom upShortest word transformation chain
HardgraphbfsstringsMinimum edit distance
Harddynamic programmingstringsedit distance
System design
10 questionsDesign a distributed rate limiter
Design a rate limiter for a public API used by many clients.
Scope: Cover the algorithm, where the state lives, limits per client, and what happens when the limiter itself fails.
Standardrate limitingdistributed systemsreliabilityDesign a URL shortener
Design a service that turns long URLs into short links and redirects visitors.
Scope: Cover id generation, read-heavy traffic, caching, and analytics.
Warm-upurl shortenerhashingcachingDesign a social news feed
Design a home feed that shows posts from the people a user follows.
Scope: Cover fan-out, ranking, freshness, and how you handle very popular accounts.
Hardnews feedfan outrankingDesign a real-time chat system
Design one-to-one and group chat with delivery receipts and history.
Scope: Cover connection management, ordering, offline delivery, and message storage.
HardchatwebsocketsorderingDesign a unique id generator
Design a service that issues globally unique ids at high volume.
Scope: Cover coordination, clock behavior, ordering, and how ids stay sortable.
Standardunique idssnowflakeclock skewDesign a notification service
Design a service that sends push, email, and SMS notifications to a large user base.
Scope: Cover the pipeline from event to delivery, retries, deduplication, and user preferences.
Standardnotificationsqueuesfan outDesign search autocomplete
Design typeahead suggestions for a search box that serves millions of users.
Scope: Cover the data structure, how suggestions are ranked, freshness, and the read path.
StandardsearchtriecachingDesign a distributed task scheduler
Design a system that runs scheduled and recurring jobs across a fleet of workers.
Scope: Cover scheduling, retries, exactly-once effects, and what happens when a worker dies mid-job.
Standardtask schedulingqueuesidempotencyDesign a file storage and sync service
Design a cloud drive that stores user files and syncs them across devices.
Scope: Cover chunking, deduplication, consistency, conflict handling, and multi-region durability.
Hardfile storagededuplicationconsistencyDesign a live video streaming platform
Design live streaming where creators broadcast to many viewers.
Scope: Cover ingest, transcoding, delivery, latency targets, and what happens when a stream goes viral.
Hardvideostreamingcdn
Behavioral
12 questionsOwnership end to end
Tell me about a project or system you owned end to end.
Standardownershipaccountabilityend to end deliveryDisagree and commit
Describe a time you disagreed with a technical or product decision.
Standarddisagree and commitconflictinfluenceCustomer impact
Tell me about a time you improved something meaningful for a customer.
Standardcustomer impactuser researchproduct senseFailure and recovery
Tell me about a time you failed or a project that went badly.
StandardfailuregrowthpostmortemWorking through ambiguity
Describe a time you worked on a problem with unclear requirements or shifting goals.
Hardambiguityproblem framingstakeholder alignmentDeep dive on a hard project
Pick the most technically complex project you have worked on.
Hardtechnical deptharchitecturetradeoffsInfluence without authority
Tell me about a time you changed how another team or a more senior person worked, even though you did not own their roadmap.
Standardinfluencestakeholder managementcross teamPrioritization and saying no
Walk me through a time you had more requests than capacity and had to choose.
Standardprioritizationtradeoffsstakeholder managementGrowing engineers through mentoring
Tell me about someone you mentored on your team.
StandardmentoringcoachingfeedbackLearning something new under pressure
Describe a time you had to become productive in an unfamiliar area quickly.
StandardlearningadaptabilitygrowthCross-team conflict
Tell me about a conflict where another team's incentives genuinely differed from yours.
Hardconflictcross teamstakeholder managementQuality under delivery pressure
Describe a time when a deadline pushed you to compromise on quality.
Harddeliveryqualityrisk management
About Microsoft mock interviews
How do I tailor a Microsoft mock interview to my team?
Paste the job post when you set up. We read the level and likely topics from it and pick rounds and questions to match.
What should I practise for a Microsoft behavioral interview?
Stories about learning under pressure, recovering from failure and resolving cross-team conflict. All three are in the behavioral library.
Can I practise a whole Microsoft loop in one day?
You can run several rounds back to back, but spacing them out works better. The plan spreads them across the days before your interview.
More ways to practise
Start your Microsoft mock interview.
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