Microsoft Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) Interview Guide
This guide covers the interview loop for Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) candidates interviewing at Microsoft. It incorporates comments from 3 senior MLEs who’ve worked at Microsoft, recent reports from Microsoft MLE candidates, and insight from 22 transcripts (with approval from candidates and coaches, of course). We’ve covered the core structure for each round (including changes made to the loop in 2026), and made sure to include interview questions from as recently as last month.
TL;DR MLE loops at Microsoft could look like:
Step 1: Recruiter screen, or direct call with a hiring manager
Step 2: Online assessment (Codility) or a technical screen
Step 3: Onsite loop - 3–5 rounds:
- 3.1 Coding/DSA
- 3.2 ML theory and ML coding
- 3.3 ML system design
- 3.4 Agentic AI design (Microsoft AI loops, newer and still unstandardized)
- 3.5 Project deep dive and behavioral questions
Step 4: Final “As Appropriate” (AA) round with a senior interviewer
Machine learning roles at Microsoft are not standardized. There are traditional MLEs, AI/ML SWEs, Applied Scientists, Members of Technical Staff (MTS) in Microsoft AI and the work and interview process change based on the variables.
The same work can have different titles and bands. That’s why we suggest you also check our guides on other ML roles at Microsoft.
An overview of the Microsoft MLE interview process
Due to the variability of the role, there is no single fixed sequence. Treat the process described here as overall guidelines on what to expect. For specifics, confirm with your recruiter.
Round | What is Microsoft looking for? |
|---|---|
Recruiter screen · 30 mins | Is your ML experience specific to what the role demands? Do you fit in the team's operating model? Is your skillset what the team needs at the moment? “Why Microsoft” |
Online assessment (some candidates) and/or technical screen · Codility, 2 problems | How do you clarify requirements before coding? How clean and optimal your code is. Can you account for edge cases? |
Onsite: Coding/DSA · 45–60 mins | This round can feature similar questions to the OA and interviewers will be evaluating your code in the same way. Are you a strong communicator? Can you explain why and how you’re making technical choices? How do you approach coding problems? How do you clarify requirements? Can you use AI tools at a high level? |
Onsite: ML theory / ML coding · 45–60 mins | How solid your basic ML knowledge is. How precisely can you define machine learning concepts? How strong is your machine learning reasoning ability? How deep your ML, and GenAI, experience is. |
Onsite: ML system design · 45–60 mins | ML system design experience. Do you have the technical chops for the role, and can you connect the technical details to the business goals. Do you communicate in a structural manner? When making decisions do you reason through the various paths and consider trade-offs intelligently? Strong candidates think about the entire lifecycle, from idea to evaluation. For senior candidates, can you lead the interview? |
Onsite: Agentic design (some roles) · 45–60 mins | Agentic AI system design experience. Same as above How far can you stretch and how do you think? Do you understand LLM fundamentals on a deeper level? |
Onsite: HM / behavioral · 45–60 mins | Who are you and what have you done? What’s the level of depth and ownership you’ve shown in your past projects? Past experience and evidence of project ownership. |
Onsite: AA / senior round (some loops) · 45 mins | No specific agenda, questions could be technical or focus on leadership and role fit. How well can you handle pressure and stay calm? |
The recruiter screen or hiring manager call
The Microsoft recruiter screen is standard and you’ll be asked the usual questions. Some candidates (especially senior ones) will skip this screening and will have a call with the hiring manager instead.
These questions have been asked by Microsoft recruiters:
- Can you tell me a bit more about your career journey so far and your most recent role?
- Why are you switching roles?
- Can you tell me about your work?
Because the interview process is super flexible, we suggest you try and get as many details about it as you can. Ask for a round-by-round breakdown of the onsite.
The online assessment and/or technical screen
The Microsoft OA is on Codility. You’ll get two coding questions and the expectation is for you to solve all the edge cases as well.
If you’re a senior candidate expect to skip the OA and go straight to the technical screen. Some candidates have reported they skipped the tech screen as well and went straight to the onsite after the recruiter or HM call.
These questions have been reported for Microsoft OAs and technical screens:
- Given a string, what is the minimum number of adjacent swaps required to convert a string into a palindrome. If not possible, return -1.
- You are given a string S consisting only of characters 'A' and 'B’. You can delete any number of characters in S to make S balanced. S is balanced if there is no pair of indices (i,j) such that i < j and S[i] = 'B' and S[j]= 'A'. Return the minimum number of deletions needed to make S balanced.
- Given a string S and an integer K, the task is to find the lexicographically smallest string possible after reversing any substring of any length exactly K times.
According to one Microsoft employee, the difficulty can be harder than the onsite and you will need a perfect OA to pass. You can book a mock interview with a senior MLE at Microsoft over on Prepfully to prepare for the OA.
Microsoft employee on Blind says that the difficulty can be harder than any rounds of the onsite and candidates need a perfect OA to pass.
The Microsoft MLE onsite loop
The onsite loop for MLEs at Microsoft features 3 to 5 rounds. Interviews can be virtual and split across 2 days.
Some rounds could be mixed as in you could have both ML theory and a small system design question in one round, it all depends on your interviewer. Also expect to be asked behavioral questions in all your interviews. Interviewers tend to open with your resume and experience and then focus on the specific questions they want to ask.
If you’re a senior candidate, the expectation will be for you to lead your rounds and drive the discussion forward. As one of our senior coaches who is also a Principal ML Engineer at Microsoft says:
An expectation I have of senior candidates is that they lead the interview, and not need me to guide them. I might just jump and ask some clarifying questions. I do expect from a similar level to be able to handle ambiguity and drive this discussion…Do not allow them to just steer you left and right. You need to demonstrate that you are feeling confident that you know what are the main things that you would like to cover.
Coding round(s)
The coding interviews feature LeetCode style problems, usually medium difficulty. The most common topics are graphs, arrays, strings, hashmaps, two-pointer patterns, and trees.
This round could be (partly or entirely) an AI-assisted coding interview as well so check the expectation with your recruiter beforehand. For AI coding rounds, you might be asked to work in a multi-file codebase with access to Copilot or other tools.
Microsoft interviewers can set and design their own questions so depending on the team you might have to review the codebase or debug tasks as well.
Interviewers are watching what and how you delegate to AI and how you architect the overall solution. They also expect candidates to vet the output and make sure it’s optimal.
These coding questions have been asked of MLE candidates at Microsoft:
- Reconstruct a DNA string from fragments tagged at both ends. Three-part: ordered chain → undirected chain (Eulerian path) → multi-chain decomposition.
- Design an algorithm to serialize and deserialize a binary tree. There is no restriction on how your serialization/deserialization algorithm should work. You just need to ensure that a binary tree can be serialized to a string and this string can be deserialized to the original tree structure.
- You are given an array of people where people[i] is the weight of the ith person, and an infinite number of boats where each boat can carry a maximum weight of limit. Each boat carries at most two people at the same time, provided the sum of the weight of those people is at most limit. Return the minimum number of boats to carry every given person.
- Given an m x n matrix mat, return an array of all the elements of the array in a diagonal order.
MLEs have to meet the Microsoft SWE coding bar at minimum so we recommend you check out our SWE guide as well. And for more Microsoft & coding questions, check out our free Microsoft MLE interview question bank right here.
We recommend you talk about the brute force solution first and try to write an optimal (or at least sub-optimal) solution as fast as you can.
Before and while you approach the problem, talk through your reasoning with the interviewer so they can easily follow along with what you’re doing.
ML theory and ML coding
This round is very team dependent. Some interviewers will be more conversational in their approach, others will give you an exercise you have to solve. Either way, expect a lot of follow-up questions.
Interviewers want to see how precisely you can define concepts and if you understand the deeper technicalities behind them as well.
Microsoft MLE candidates have been asked these questions:
- Given this dataset, please implement a simple model evaluation using sklearn.
- What is the difference between DCN and DCN v2? Why does it work?
- If you want to do some crossing between the wide and deep parts of a ranking model, how do you do it?
- Can you compare the solution about pre-trained embedding versus the co-training embedding?
- What is tokenization? What is the position encoding?
This round can be highly dependent on what your target team works on. We suggest you ask your recruiter for details on your interviewers to figure out what they might ask.
ML system design
The system design round(s) carry the most weight for MLEs at Microsoft.
Your interviewer will give you an ML product problem, and you have to walk them through it from 0 to 100.
Microsoft interviewers can also start with theory and ask you to back up or explain with something you’ve done in the past.
MLE candidates have been asked these system design questions at Microsoft:
- Can you design an internal chatbot for a finance company? The employees and tech support staff should both be able to use it, and the files they’ll be searching are multi-modal so how would you account for that?
- Let’s design an A/B test that’s capable of testing the new model that the team has created against the control. What does this process look like? (can be asked as a follow up as well)
Microsoft interviewers can ask follow-up questions like:
- How do you make sure the generative model can meet the 250-millisecond latency requirement?
- How are you planning to rank the results returned by the model?
- How would you go about customizing a model for embedding generation specifically for a use case like this?
Our coach who is a Principal MLE at Microsoft suggests you always start off with a skeleton for your answer to follow along with:
You need to have a backbone here. What I mean is that you need to be able to share a skeleton. This is the way that I’m actually going to approach this question. Have the section cover everything because we’re jumping a lot… So definitely the number one feedback is to organize your thought process better.
Once you hear the problem, we suggest you slow it down and ask scoping questions like:
- Is it multilingual or English only? What is the initial size of the documents?
- What is the frequency of addition of the new documents?
- What is the optimization goal?
- What is the definition of the engagement here?
Microsoft interviewers can also ask to connect ML metrics to business KPIs.
At the end of the round, your interviewers could screenshot the whiteboard and share the design with the other interviewers. So be sure to keep the board updated as you talk, because any details you talk about but don’t record with the same level of detail might not reach the following interviewers.
Senior candidates are also expected to provide various options and explain why they’d pick one over the other.
The standard reference guide our coaches recommend is Chip Huyen’s Designing Machine Learning Systems, if you have time before your onsite be sure to read through it. Alternatively, you can book a coaching call with one of Prepfully's Microsoft MLE coaches.
If you’re a senior candidate, expect the problem to be less defined for you. You might be asked something vague on purpose like design an Auto ML capability. Your job is to define the use case and problem statement as well.
The agentic design round (Microsoft AI and certain roles)
If you're interviewing with Microsoft AI, you will likely have an agentic AI design round as well. You could have this round even for other roles, and be sure to revise agentic design well, especially if you have any experience deploying agents.
The format could be quite open since it’s not a standardized round across Microsoft. You might be given an API key for an LLM and have to ‘whip up some prompts’ and do some creative orchestration to fulfill a task. Or you could be asked to whiteboard a design and implement one part of it.
You could be asked these questions:
- Design an agent that can do [X] with tools.
- Build a RAG chatbot for a medical institution that provides a summary of services only. Do not capture personal data and ensure no medical advice is given. Capture any potential PII and ensure no PII goes to an LLM.
- When would you use a multi-agent swarm instead of a single LLM with multiple tools?
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in his personal blog: “We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe “tools use”. This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world.”
That is the direction he sees AI heading in and broadly speaking that’s the skillset Microsoft interviewers are looking for.
We suggest you ask your recruiter what interviewers will expect of you for this round. Along with orchestration, prepare what you’d build to evaluate the agents.
Project deep dive and behavioral questions
Microsoft interviewers can ask behavioral questions and questions based on your projects in any previous round. You could also have a separate behavioral round that will focus on your past work, and sometimes Microsoft interviewers might ask technical questions here as well.
Microsoft MLE candidates have been asked these questions:
- Can you tell me the whole life cycle of one of the projects that you’ve led that you consider to be your most significant accomplishment to date?
- Can you give me a time that you discovered some opportunities by yourself? But the other colleagues are not convinced. Then how do you push things forward?
- Tell me about a time an ML model you built failed or you didn’t get the results you wanted. How did you handle it and what did you learn out of it?
- Can you tell me about the last piece of constructive criticism or feedback you received?
Standard advice here, answer in STAR format and wherever applicable tie your answers to Microsoft’s cultural attributes.
The AA round and senior loops
The Microsoft loop can end with a final ‘as appropriate’ interview. This round is carried out by a senior interviewer who comes from outside the team.
Getting to this interview is a great sign, and AA interviewers will try to get an overall view of your experience and abilities. They’ll specifically focus on any weaker aspects previous interviewers might’ve flagged. They could ask you technical questions or behavioral ones, it all depends on your performance during the loop.
These questions could be asked by ‘AA’ interviewers at Microsoft to MLE candidates:
- Sometimes we need to operate under very tight conditions and very tight constraints where trade offs are necessary. I would like to hear about the time where you had to make such a trade off and how did you prioritize?
- How do you handle an opinionated VP or senior stakeholder?
- Tell me about a time when you had to give the most difficult feedback.
- Can you tell me about a time when you helped a colleague grow professionally or personally in their career?
Compensation
Total comp for Microsoft MLEs ranges from $161K ($130K base) at L59 to $412K ($219K base) at L65 according to data from levels.fyi.
RSUs vest equally, so 25% for four years, or 20% for five years.