Microsoft Applied Research Scientist interview questions
based on 1 rating - Updated Mar 21, 2026
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Applied Research Scientist applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 66.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Applied Research Scientist according to 1 Glassdoor interviews include:
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They asked hypothetical questions about building support for teams, like using data they have available and agents. Then came the second step which was a concrete coding question (see below) in an IDE of my choosing.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Problem: Top K Most Similar Documents
You are given:
an integer array queryEmb of length D, representing a query embedding
a 2D integer array docEmbs of size N x D, representing N document embeddings
an integer k
All embeddings are already L2-normalized.
The cosine similarity between two normalized vectors is equal to their dot product.
Return the indices of the k documents with the highest cosine similarity to queryEmb, ordered from most similar to least similar.
If k > N, return all document indices sorted by similarity.
Function Signature
def topKSimilar(queryEmb: np.ndarray, docEmbs: np.ndarray, k: int) -> np.ndarray