OpenAI interview questions

Showing 151–180 of 342 results

• Design a persistent key-value storeMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design persistent storage and in-memory data structures, covering serialization of arbitrary values, medium/interface design for byte-level persistence, crash-consistent flushing, error handling, and performance and complexity analysis.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design a production RAG systemHard

  An OpenAI ML system design interview question (MLE technical screen): design a production, multi-tenant retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system for enterprise document QA. The model answer covers ingestion and chunking, embedding selection, ANN/vector indexing (HNSW vs IVF-PQ), hybrid retrieval and cross-encoder re-ranking, prompt orchestration with citation grounding, hallucination mitigation, caching and freshness, multilingual and PII/safety handling, scalability and disaster recovery, observability and offline/online evaluation, an API and data schema, cost controls, and a phased rollout. It tests trade-off reasoning across recall, latency, cost, and compliance.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a recommendation system end-to-endHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in large-scale machine learning system design, including architecture for candidate generation and ranking, feature engineering across real-time and batch pipelines, training and serving workflows, and monitoring for fairness and safety.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a regional surge pricing strategyHard

  This question evaluates skills in designing real-time surge pricing systems, assessing competencies in machine learning modeling, control and pricing logic, data engineering, operational robustness, explainability, and monitoring within the System Design domain.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a response-ranking ML systemHard

  Design a response-ranking ML system evaluates ML product requirements, data/labeling, modeling, serving architecture, evaluation, monitoring, and trade-offs 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 EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a sandboxed cloud IDEEasy

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing multi-tenant distributed systems with strong isolation and sandboxing, runtime lifecycle management, real-time output/log streaming, data persistence, autoscaling, and observability.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a scalable payment systemHard

  Design a scalable payment system 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 search query autocomplete systemHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a real-time, low-latency search autocomplete system, exercising competencies in architecture, indexing and serving, ranking and personalization, typo-tolerance, multilingual support, abuse prevention and privacy-aware data handling; it is categorized under System Design and emphasizes practical application with architectural-level conceptual reasoning. It is commonly asked to assess how candidates balance stringent latency and scalability requirements with personalization and trending signals, robustness to input errors and multiple languages, and metrics-driven trade-offs across caching, ranking and monitoring.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a social network with snapshotsMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a memory-efficient versioned graph structure that supports efficient edge retrieval at arbitrary points in time.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Design a team chat systemHard

  This question tests the ability to design a scalable, low-latency, real-time messaging system, focusing on message ordering, delivery guarantees, and high-concurrency state management.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a text-to-video GPU job scheduler with one GPU per task and fair queueingMedium

  Design a GPU job scheduler for a text-to-video generation service where each task runs on a single GPU and users share capacity through fair queueing. It tests job store design, fairness by GPU time rather than task count, leases and retries, and failure handling across workers, GPUs and the scheduler.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an AI playground editorHard

  This problem tests your ability to design a scalable, low-latency document editor that integrates real-time AI streaming responses into a persistent, collaborative text environment.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an AWS fine-tuning platform for LLMsHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing cloud-native ML platforms for fine-tuning large language models, covering distributed training, multi-tenant security and isolation, cost controls, reproducibility, observability, checkpointing, and deployment workflows.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design an Agent Harness and Evaluation SystemMedium

  Design a safe harness and evaluation platform for a tool-using AI agent. Address isolated execution, repeatable task sets, trajectory tracing, deterministic and rubric-based graders, repeated trials, privacy, regression gates, and reward-hacking risks.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design an Asynchronous Text-to-Video Generation ServiceMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a high-latency, asynchronous job-processing pipeline with a focus on fault tolerance, job state management, and reliable resource handling.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an Editable Text BufferMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design an efficient data structure for text manipulation while implementing undo/redo history and a dynamic prefix-based autocomplete feature.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design an Extensible Simulation EngineHard

  This problem tests object-oriented design patterns and modular architecture by requiring the implementation of a simulation engine that remains agnostic to the specific rules of a two-player turn-based game.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Design an In-Memory Key-Value CacheHard

  Implement a thread-safe in-memory key-value cache supporting capacity bounds, LRU eviction, and per-key time-to-live (TTL) expiration.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Design an Instagram-like Feed SystemMedium

  This question assesses the ability to architect a high-scale feed system by balancing pre-computation (push model) versus on-demand computation (pull model) to minimize latency for social media users.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an ML search systemHard

  This question evaluates system-design and information-retrieval competencies for machine-learning-powered enterprise document search, covering ingestion and indexing pipelines, hybrid lexical and semantic retrieval, feature generation and ranking, multi-tenant access control, and security/compliance.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an ML search system with RAGHard

  Design an ML search system with RAG evaluates ML product requirements, data/labeling, modeling, serving architecture, evaluation, monitoring, and trade-offs in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an OOD detection systemMedium

  This question tests the ability to design an end-to-end system for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data in production LLMs to ensure reliability and safety.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an Offline Merchant Payment System with ReconciliationMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a distributed payment architecture that supports asynchronous transactions and reliable reconciliation between offline Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals and a centralized ledger.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an On-Demand Cloud Notebook Service for ML EngineersHard

  Design a platform that gives ML engineers on-demand, GPU-backed notebook workspaces they can create, connect to, pause, and resume, covering lifecycle and API design, provisioning latency, persistent storage, and idle-cost control.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an Online Chess Platform: Elo Matchmaking, WebSocket Moves, Game ClocksHard

  Design an online chess platform: match players of similar Elo rating quickly, deliver moves in real time over WebSocket connections, and enforce fair game clocks despite network latency and disconnections. It tests matchmaking, stateful real-time architecture, server-authoritative timing and failover.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an Online Chess Service from Launch to ScaleMedium

  This problem tests the ability to design a real-time, stateful gaming system, focusing on concurrency control, low-latency communication, and fault tolerance.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an Online Devbox Service for On-Demand Cloud Development EnvironmentsHard

  System design question about an online devbox service that gives engineers cloud development environments they can create, connect to, stop and resume. It tests lifecycle and API design, fast provisioning, persistent workspace storage, connection routing, isolation of user code, idle cost control and failure handling.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an Online Development BoxHard

  Design an online devbox with authenticated workspace access, isolated code execution, persistent project files, reliable stop/resume, and controlled startup costs.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an Online Multiplayer Chess Service with Real-Time MovesHard

  Design an online chess service where two remote players play live games, every move is validated and delivered to the opponent immediately, and results are recorded. It tests authoritative game state, real-time transport, fair clocks, move ordering, recovery of games in progress after failures, and scaling to many concurrent games and spectators.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an SSH-Based Cloud Development EnvironmentHard

  This question tests your ability to design a distributed system that manages stateful, long-running compute resources while ensuring isolation, high availability, and secure remote access.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite