OpenAI interview questions

Showing 121–150 of 342 results

• Design a Reliable Payment Processing SystemMedium

  Design a reliable payment-processing service that prevents duplicate charges and preserves an auditable state history through retries and partial failures. Cover idempotency, exact money representation, timeout ambiguity, asynchronous callbacks, reconciliation, state transitions, partitioning, and operational controls.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Resumable Iterator with Checkpoint and RestoreMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design serializable, stateful abstractions in both in-memory and I/O-bound contexts. It tests understanding of iterator patterns, checkpoint-restore semantics, and test-driven development — competencies commonly assessed in engineering roles requiring systems thinking and API design rigor.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systemHard

  This question tests the ability to design an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, focusing on balancing retrieval accuracy, latency, data freshness, and system reliability.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Slack-Like Messaging SystemMedium

  This System Design question evaluates a candidate's ability to architect a scalable, durable real-time messaging system, testing skills in distributed systems, data modeling, API design, persistence versus low-latency delivery, ordering guarantees, missed-message recovery, notifications, and operational scaling.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Slack-like real-time messaging systemHard

  This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, low-latency messaging system that handles concurrent message delivery, persistence, and synchronization across multiple devices.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Sora-Style Video Generation Service with Fair Queueing and CancellationMedium

  A system design question about building a Sora-style text-to-video generation service in which every generation task runs on exactly one GPU. It tests task lifecycle and dispatch design, fair sharing of GPU time across many users, and cancellation of queued and running tasks, including whether a direct RPC to the worker is enough.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Text-to-Video Generation Platform (Sora-style)Hard

  This problem evaluates your ability to design a distributed ML infrastructure that handles high-latency, resource-intensive inference jobs while ensuring scalability, reliability, and content safety.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a Text-to-Video Generation ServiceMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a scalable, reliable asynchronous inference pipeline for resource-intensive generative models, focusing on task orchestration, GPU scheduling, and latency management.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Text-to-Video Generation SystemHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable ML inference platforms, including GPU resource management and scheduling, asynchronous job orchestration and state-machine-driven job lifecycles, failure classification and recovery, artifact storage, rate limiting, and monitoring for quality and latency.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a Tier-Aware AI Video Generation ServiceMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, asynchronous task processing system that balances resource fairness, reliability in the face of compute failures, and tiered prioritization.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Time-Windowed GPU Credit LedgerMedium

  Design an in-memory credit ledger that manages time-windowed resource grants and consumptions with out-of-order event ingestion, deterministic allocation, and balance reconciliation.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Design a URL ShortenerMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a highly scalable, distributed URL shortening service, focusing on database schema design, request routing, and efficient short-code generation.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a URL shortening serviceHard

  This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, high-scale URL shortening service, focusing on data modeling, collision-resistant ID generation, and performance optimization via caching.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a User-Respecting Smart-Grid ControllerHard

  Design a distributed demand-response and curtailment controller for an electrical grid that sheds load during emergencies while strictly respecting user preferences, device criticalities, and fairness constraints.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Video Generation Service with GPU Fleet ManagementMedium

  Tests the ability to design an end-to-end distributed ML inference system for compute-intensive video generation, focusing on GPU scheduling, job lifecycle management, fault tolerance, and cost efficiency.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a chatbot (system design)Medium

  This question evaluates system design skills for ML-powered chatbots with a front-end focus, testing understanding of client-side privacy and storage lifetimes, streamed response delivery, stateless relay architectures, authentication boundaries, rate limiting, and failure-mode handling.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a chatbot fallback for unknown questionsHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in ML system design, focusing on handling model uncertainty, retrieval-augmented components, tool integration, decision policies, and operational evaluation within the ML System Design domain.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a crossword puzzle solver systemHard

  This problem tests the ability to design an efficient search and constraint-solving system for crossword puzzles, requiring optimized data structures for prefix lookups and a backtracking strategy to handle search space pruning.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a distributed crossword fill solverMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a scalable, distributed architecture capable of solving large-scale constraint satisfaction problems (crossword filling) across a vast vocabulary.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a free-month experimentHard

  This question evaluates experimental design, causal inference, metric selection, bias mitigation, ROI estimation, and stakeholder communication skills within the Analytics & Experimentation domain for a Data Scientist role.

  OpenAIData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationTechnical Screen
• Design a fullstack app with frontend focusHard

  Design a fullstack app with frontend focus evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a harmful video content moderation systemHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, multi-modal machine learning systems for content moderation, covering architecture, model strategy, labeling and human-in-the-loop workflows, metrics, auditability, and defenses against adversarial evasion.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a low-latency RAG systemHard

  This question evaluates ML system design skills, specifically the ability to architect retrieval-augmented generation pipelines under strict latency, cost, and multi-tenancy constraints. It tests how candidates reason about vector search, re-ranking, and LLM integration at production scale — a core competency for senior machine learning engineering roles.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a metrics monitoring system, going deep on one or two componentsMedium

  A system design question about a metrics monitoring system that collects time series from services and hosts, stores them, serves dashboard queries and raises alerts. After a brief end-to-end sketch, the candidate goes deep on one or two areas, such as time-series storage, label cardinality, downsampling or reliable alert evaluation.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a minimal ChatGPT with presetsHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing multi-tenant conversational AI services with reusable, versioned presets, covering API design, data modeling, session state and context-window management, scalability, multi-tenant isolation, privacy, and observability.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a multi-device calendar applicationMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed calendar system focusing on synchronization, conflict resolution for overlapping time slots, and efficient storage of recurring events.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a multi-tenant CI/CD platformHard

  An OpenAI software-engineering system-design screen asking you to design a scalable, multi-tenant CI/CD platform. It spans Git/event intake, YAML workflow parsing into a job DAG, fair scheduling and runner isolation, live log and status streaming, per-tenant quotas and billing, observability, audit logging, disaster recovery, and zero-downtime deploys.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a multi-tenant Slack-like messengerHard

  This question evaluates skills in large-scale distributed systems architecture, real-time messaging and presence, data modeling for multi-tenant platforms, security and compliance features, and operational concerns like observability and cost efficiency.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a parser for a hypothetical languageMedium

  This question evaluates competency in compiler and language design, covering grammar analysis, parsing algorithms (LL/LR/GLR/Earley/PEG), lexer and parser implementation, AST construction, error reporting and recovery, operator precedence and associativity, and analysis of time/space trade-offs.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Design a payment system with holds and batchingHard

  This question tests the ability to design a high-consistency payment processing system that handles asynchronous state transitions, authorization holds, and batch settlement workflows.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen