Microsoft coding interview
Round 4 of 5 · 49 questions reported
- Length
- 60 min
- Format
- Ten to fifteen minutes of behavioral questions, then coding in HackerRank where you write a main and make the tests pass; usually three rounds
- They grade
- Working code that passes the interviewer's tests
- AI use
- No AI unless the interviewer invites it; some 2026 loops add a round where you bring your own AI agent
- Heads-up
- Microsoft AI coding rounds use practical problems (an in-memory database, a beam search decoder, a data loader) rather than puzzles.
Questions Microsoft asks in this round 49
- Implement an LRU cacheAug 2026 · sometimes
- In-memory SQL table with filtering and multi-key sortingMay 2026 · sometimes
- Reconstruct a string from chained segmentsMay 2026 · sometimes
- Greedy and beam search decoding for a language modelSep 2026 · rarely
- Count the maximum in each queried suffixAug 2026 · rarely
- Weighted data batcher with deterministic resumeMar 2026 · rarely
- Truncate model output at the first stop sequenceMar 2026 · rarely
- Next greater palindromeJan 2026 · rarely
- Typed task lock for mutually exclusive job typesFeb 2026 · once
- Assign node labels to maximize the total edge sum
- Build the longest spike from an array
- Compress an n-ary tree by promoting children
- Count distinct values in every sliding window
- Count letters whose lowercase copies all come before uppercase
- Count recipes a pantry can cover
- Count valid 24-hour times from four digits
- Days when the whole team is free
- Employee shift timeline table
- Fewest coins that cover every amount up to a limit
- Finish times for round-robin tasks
- First occurrence or floor index in a sorted array
- Gift delivery scheduler with limited agents
- Group duplicate records that share any property
- Integer to English words, built up by range
- Largest group of mutual strangers in an acquaintance forest
- Largest number by changing up to k digits to 5
- Largest square from 1x1 and 2x2 tiles
- Largest value shared by two BSTs
- Longest palindrome from equal-length words
- Longest proper prefix that is also a suffix
- Longest subsequence of one string that is a substring of another
- Longest substring without three repeats in a row
- Maximum tests in one activation window
- Merge two n-ary trees by child position
- Merge two sorted arrays into distinct values
- Merge two sorted interval lists
- Minimum adjacent swaps to group red balls
- Minimum flips to make every row and column a palindrome
- Minimum swaps to put evens before odds
- Multi-tap keypad: every string a press sequence can spell
- Recent file tracker with date and insertion order
- Recent search history with a size limit
- Root of the largest tree in a forest
- Set an even-parity bit in a byte's MSB
- Shortest equal length for two boards covering every hole
- Sliding-window request rate limiter
- Spell a word on a 5-column letter board
- Temporal key-value store with point-in-time reads and restore
- Window with the most copies of a target value
About the Microsoft coding round
What does Microsoft ask in the coding round?
The most asked: Implement an LRU cache, In-memory SQL table with filtering and multi-key sorting and Reconstruct a string from chained segments. 49 questions reported in all.
How long is the Microsoft coding round?
About 60 minutes.
What is the Microsoft coding round like?
Ten to fifteen minutes of behavioral questions, then coding in HackerRank where you write a main and make the tests pass; usually three rounds. They grade: Working code that passes the interviewer's tests.
Can you use AI in the Microsoft coding round?
No AI unless the interviewer invites it; some 2026 loops add a round where you bring your own AI agent.