Morgan Stanley interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Morgan Stanley software engineering interview across 4 levels and 18 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Morgan Stanley salary & ratings · All interview processes

Technology Summer Analyst (SDE Intern)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: No formally published cooldown; candidates typically reapply

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (Aptitude + Debugging + Coding)

    Assessment · ~80 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Merge Intervals — Given a collection of intervals [start, end], merge all overlapping intervals and return the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the input ranges. Input: first line n, then n lines each with two integers. Output: each merged interval on its own line.

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview (DSA + CS Fundamentals + Projects)

    Onsite · ~30-80 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Binary Tree Level Order Traversal — Given the root of a binary tree, return its nodes in level-order (breadth-first) order. Input: whitespace-separated level-order token list where 'N' denotes a null child. Output: node values in BFS order, space-separated on one line.

  3. Round 2: Technical + HR / Behavioral Round

    Behavioral · ~10-45 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Technology Analyst (campus / entry-level SWE, Bengaluru/Mumbai)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 1-2 days · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (HackerRank)

    Assessment · ~90 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock — Given an array prices where prices[i] is the stock price on day i, find the maximum profit from buying on one day and selling on a later day. Return 0 if no profit is possible.

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview 1 (Coding / DSA)

    Phone · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters — Given a string s, return the length of the longest substring that contains no repeating characters.

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview 2 (Coding + CS fundamentals / OOP)

    Onsite · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Sort Colors (Sort an array of 0s, 1s and 2s) — Given an array containing only the values 0, 1 and 2, sort it in place in a single pass using constant extra space (Dutch National Flag partition).

  4. Round 3: Techno-Managerial Round

    Behavioral · ~30-45 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  5. Round 4: HR / Behavioral (Fit & Values)

    Behavioral · ~30 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Associate (experienced SWE, ~2-6 yrs, Bengaluru/Mumbai)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-6 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Online / Pen-Paper Assessment (team-dependent)

    Assessment · ~45-90 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

  2. Round 1: Technical Round 1 (Java deep-dive + coding + SQL)

    Onsite · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Merge Intervals — Given a list of intervals [start, end], merge all overlapping intervals and return the resulting non-overlapping set.

  3. Round 2: Technical Round 2 (DSA + Low-Level / OO Design)

    System_design · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design / Implement an LRU Cache — Design a data structure for a Least-Recently-Used cache supporting get(key) and put(key,value) in O(1). On capacity overflow, evict the least-recently-used entry. Discuss the hash-map + doubly-linked-list design, thread-safety, and how you'd extend it to return the last N unique entries.

  4. Round 3: Managerial Round (Hiring Manager / Director)

    Behavioral · ~30-45 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  5. Round 4: HR / Compensation & Values

    Behavioral · ~30 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Vice President (senior SWE / Technical Lead, ~8-12+ yrs, Bengaluru/Mumbai)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: Typically 4-6+ weeks; more rounds and more senior interviewe · Recommended prep: 4-6 weeks · Cooldown: No published cooldown.

  1. Round 0: Technical / Coding Round

    Onsite · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Longest Common Subsequence — Given two strings a and b, return the length of their longest common subsequence (characters need not be contiguous but must keep order). Input: line 1 = a, line 2 = b.

  2. Round 1: System / Architecture Design

    System_design · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a distributed API rate limiter — Design a distributed rate limiter that protects an API from being overwhelmed across many app servers. Cover algorithm choice (token/leaky bucket, sliding window), where counters live (Redis vs local + sync), consistency vs latency trade-offs, handling bursts, and failure modes when the store is unavailable.

  3. Round 2: Deep-Dive Technical (Concurrency / Internals / Patterns)

    Onsite · ~45 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Maximum Profit in Job Scheduling — Given n jobs each with a startTime, endTime and profit, choose a subset of non-overlapping jobs (a job ending at time X does not conflict with one starting at X) to maximize total profit. Input: n, then n lines of 'start end profit'. Output the maximum profit.

  4. Round 3: Managerial / Leadership Round (Director / ED)

    Behavioral · ~45 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  5. Round 4: HR / Fit & Compensation

    Behavioral · ~30 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

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Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.