Operations Research Scientist Interview Questions

1,036 operations research scientist interview questions shared by candidates

I went through interview questions posted in the interview reviews on glassdoor for the Research Scientist position. Most of them are about research questions and details about the interviewees technical presentation. I have not been asked even a single question about my research or even questions related to machine learning though the position title is research scientist in machine learning. The questions I had were all about undergrad CS fundamentals like boggle finder for word in 2D grid, double linked list insertion (the easiest question), compute the value intervals of each node in a binary tree, and computational complexity of different search and sorting algorithms. Very disappointed about my interview which doesn't match with the title of the job position.
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Research Scientist

Interviewed at Microsoft

4
Jul 1, 2018

I went through interview questions posted in the interview reviews on glassdoor for the Research Scientist position. Most of them are about research questions and details about the interviewees technical presentation. I have not been asked even a single question about my research or even questions related to machine learning though the position title is research scientist in machine learning. The questions I had were all about undergrad CS fundamentals like boggle finder for word in 2D grid, double linked list insertion (the easiest question), compute the value intervals of each node in a binary tree, and computational complexity of different search and sorting algorithms. Very disappointed about my interview which doesn't match with the title of the job position.

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
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Applied Research Scientist

Interviewed at Microsoft

4
Mar 21, 2026

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

In an undirected connected graph G = (N, A), an Euler tour is a walk that starts at some node, visits each arc exactly once, and returns to the starting node. A graph is Eulerian if it contains an Euler tour. Show that in an Eulerian graph, the degree of every node is even. Next, show that if every node in a connected graph has an even degree, the graph is Eulerian. Establish the second result by describing an O(m) algorithm for determining whether a graph is Eulerian and, if so, will construct an Euler tour. (Hint: Describe an algorithm that decomposes any graph with only even-degree nodes into a collection of arc-disjoint cycles, and then converts the cycles into an Euler tour.)
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Senior OPerations Research Scientist

Interviewed at Optym

3.6
Dec 24, 2022

In an undirected connected graph G = (N, A), an Euler tour is a walk that starts at some node, visits each arc exactly once, and returns to the starting node. A graph is Eulerian if it contains an Euler tour. Show that in an Eulerian graph, the degree of every node is even. Next, show that if every node in a connected graph has an even degree, the graph is Eulerian. Establish the second result by describing an O(m) algorithm for determining whether a graph is Eulerian and, if so, will construct an Euler tour. (Hint: Describe an algorithm that decomposes any graph with only even-degree nodes into a collection of arc-disjoint cycles, and then converts the cycles into an Euler tour.)

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