Online assessment · Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley OA: Coding Themes & Prep for Technology Roles
Morgan Stanley Online Assessment guide for technology analyst / SDE-style roles — coding topics, aptitude overlays, timing strategy, and interview follow-through.
Morgan Stanley tech OAs reward clean, correct code and calm debugging. Finance trivia is secondary at OA stage — correctness is not.
What to expect in the OA
Formats vary by college and role (Technology Analyst, Spring Intern, experienced hire). Common pattern: timed coding on a HackerRank-style platform, sometimes plus aptitude or debugging. Read the PDF instructions carefully — some tests disallow IDE helpers.
Coding themes worth prioritising
Arrays and strings under constraints, hashing, sorting + two pointers, trees (traversals, BST), graph BFS/DFS, and complexity analysis. Rarely need advanced DP for fresher OA — but know recursion vs iteration trade-offs.
- Practise writing code without autocomplete for 45–60 minutes
- Always state time/space complexity in comments if asked
- Handle invalid input explicitly when the prompt lists constraints
Beyond coding — light domain awareness
You do not need CFA knowledge for the OA. Still, understand what an investment bank technology team does (low-latency systems, risk, trade lifecycle at a high level) so phone screens feel natural.
How Apply helps
Tailor resume bullets toward reliability, testing, and performance. Interview prep can mix DSA with ‘why finance technology’ behavioural prompts so you do not sound generic after clearing OA.
Morgan Stanley question bank
OA / Coding · Medium
Detect if a linked list has a cycle; return the start node if asked.
OA / Coding · Medium
Find the longest substring without repeating characters.
Technical · Hard
How would you make a service idempotent for payment-like requests?
Hint: Keys, retries, exactly-once vs at-least-once.
Behavioral · Medium
Tell me about a time you owned a production or demo failure.