OpenAI interview questions

Showing 91–120 of 342 results

• Design a Distributed Rate LimiterMedium

  Tests your ability to architect a scalable, low-latency distributed rate limiter capable of enforcing multi-dimensional limits (such as requests per minute and tokens per minute) across distributed services.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Fair-Queueing Image-Upscaling Service, One GPU per JobMedium

  Design the backend for a SaaS image-upscaling API where every job runs on exactly one accelerator and a scheduler must divide a shared fleet across many paying customers, testing job-store design, weighted scheduling by accelerator-time rather than job count, and recovery from worker, accelerator, and scheduler failures.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Fault-Tolerant Online Chess ServiceMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a stateful, fault-tolerant system where move ordering, clock synchronization, and session persistence are critical for game integrity.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Fault-Tolerant Video Generation PlatformHard

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed, asynchronous system capable of handling long-running, resource-intensive tasks while ensuring idempotency and fault tolerance in the event of partial component failure.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Fleet Metrics Monitoring Platform, Then Go DeepMedium

  Sketch an end-to-end metrics pipeline for a large service fleet, then choose one or two components — cardinality control, storage layout, or alert evaluation — and design them in real depth.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a GPT chat UI with snapshots and sharingHard

  This question evaluates system-design and engineering competencies for building a multi-tenant LLM chat web application, covering real-time token streaming, snapshot/versioned data modeling, full-text and metadata search, API and schema design, role-based sharing, security, and frontend state management.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a High-Throughput Payment Authorization and Settlement SystemHard

  This problem tests the ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant distributed system that bridges external payment processors with internal ledger state management.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Highly Available Conversational AI ServiceMedium

  Start with a minimal stateless conversational AI endpoint that streams responses, then evolve it for scale and resilience. Cover safety and authorization, cancellation, admission control, backpressure, dependency failures, regional isolation, durable history, and metrics that separate serving issues from model issues.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Hosted Notebook PlatformMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a scalable, low-latency infrastructure for hosted interactive notebooks, focusing on container orchestration, state persistence, and session management.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Large-Scale Streaming AI Product FeatureHard

  Design an end-to-end streaming architecture for an AI product feature serving millions of concurrent users. The focus is on low-latency token streaming, connection lifecycle management, data persistence, and graceful failure recovery.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Live Elimination Puzzle Arena With SpectatorsMedium

  Design a real-time game in which up to ~150 players per arena solve timed puzzle rounds, the wrong and slowest are knocked out each round, and large audiences watch live standings. Tests partitioning by arena, authoritative timing, mid-round failover, and isolating spectator fan-out from gameplay.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Live Riddle Showdown With Round Eliminations and SpectatorsMedium

  Design the backend for a live multiplayer riddle showdown where wrong or slow answerers are eliminated each round and large audiences spectate in real time. Tests room sharding, authoritative round settlement, mid-round crash recovery, and isolating spectator traffic from gameplay.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Live Speed-Typing Arena With Mistake LockoutsHard

  Design the backend for a multiplayer typing race where wrong keys lock a player out for 1.5 seconds. Covers authoritative match servers, the lockout mechanism, skill-based matchmaking, ratings and leaderboards, and compensating for network latency.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Live Trivia Buzzer Arena with Wrong-Answer LockoutsHard

  Design an online trivia game where 2 to 8 players race to buzz in and answer each question correctly, and a wrong answer locks that player out for one second. Tests authoritative server design for real-time input, lockout state, matchmaking, and fairness across differing network latencies.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Multi-Tenant Online IDEMedium

  This question assesses the ability to architect a multi-tenant cloud IDE platform, focusing on secure runtime isolation, resource partitioning, and efficient state management for concurrent user environments.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Payment Lifecycle from Hold to Charge and SettlementMedium

  This problem tests the design of a distributed, idempotent payment processing system that ensures data consistency and financial integrity across asynchronous state transitions.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Payment Orchestration SystemMedium

  Design a resilient merchant-side payment orchestration platform that routes transactions across multiple payment service providers (PSPs) while enforcing strict amount invariants, idempotent state transitions, and auditability.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Payment Processing Service (Merchant to Payment Provider)Medium

  This question tests the ability to design a reliable, fault-tolerant distributed system for handling financial transactions, focusing on idempotency, atomicity, and consistent state transitions.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Payment Processing SystemHard

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed payment processing system that guarantees atomicity and consistency under high concurrency and partial network failures.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Payment Processing System with Exactly-Once ChargingHard

  This question tests the ability to design a fault-tolerant payment system that handles distributed transactions, ensures idempotency, and reconciles state with external gateways.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Payment Processor with Holds, Charges, and Network BatchesMedium

  Design a hold-and-charge payment processor with honest asynchronous results, durable deduplication, incremental network batches, and safe acknowledgment recovery.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Payment SystemEasy

  This system design question evaluates a candidate's ability to architect a reliable backend payment flow, including idempotent request handling, transactional data modeling, and reconciliation with external processors. It is commonly asked to assess practical distributed systems skills around failure handling, consistency, and scalability under real-world conditions, testing applied architectural reasoning rather than pure theory.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Payment System That Charges Customers Through an External Payment ProviderMedium

  A system design interview question asking you to design a payment system that charges customers through an external payment provider. It tests exactly-once charging under retries and timeouts, payment state machines, ledger and reconciliation design, webhook handling, and failure recovery.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Payment System: Holds and Captures, Batch Charges, Reconciliation, IdempotencyHard

  Design a payment system that places holds and captures final amounts, submits charges in batches, reconciles internal records against processor settlement reports, and never double-charges when calls are retried. It tests payment state machines, double-entry ledgers, idempotency and reconciliation.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Photo Storage Service That Deduplicates Uploads by SHA-256 Content HashMedium

  A system design question about a photo service that supports upload, download and delete while keeping only one stored copy of any content with the same SHA-256 hash. It tests content-addressed storage, reference tracking, safe deletion under concurrent uploads, and the security risks of deduplicating across users.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Real-Time Multiplayer Typing Race with Matchmaking and SpectatorsMedium

  A system design question: build a real-time multiplayer typing race where players matched by language into races of 2 to 8 type the same text, see each other's progress and errors live, freeze for one second per error, and can be watched by spectators. It tests matchmaking, server-authoritative real-time state, fan-out to spectators and fairness under network latency.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Real-Time Multiplayer Typing Race with Typo Freezes and Fair MatchmakingHard

  Design a real-time multiplayer typing race for 2 to 8 players in which the first player to type a generated passage wins and every wrong letter freezes that player for one second. The discussion covers the freeze mechanism, matchmaking, ranking players by score, and keeping races fair when players have different network delays.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Real-Time Online Chess PlatformMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a low-latency, stateful distributed system that handles real-time bidirectional communication and ensures strict move consistency.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Real-Time Sensor Intelligence SystemMedium

  This question evaluates proficiency in end-to-end machine learning system design for real-time sensor-driven products, covering sensor choice trade-offs, data collection and labeling pipelines, model selection and real-time inference, and operational constraints such as latency, reliability, privacy, efficiency, and power.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a Real-Time Trivia Battle Royale Platform with Live SpectatingMedium

  System design question about a real-time trivia battle royale in which dozens to a hundred or more players per room answer timed rounds, the wrong and slowest are eliminated, and spectators watch live leaderboards. It tests sharding by room, authoritative round settlement, fair answer timing, recovery from a server failure mid-round, and spectator isolation.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite