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Software Engineer Interview Questions
Practice 9403 coding, system design and machine learning questions from 546 companies, sorted by role, topic and interview round. Every question has step-by-step hints, a code runner that supports 8 languages and an AI mentor; members also get the full solution walkthrough.
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Showing 751–780 of 1189 results
- OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign IDE Sandbox and Payments
This question evaluates system design competencies such as distributed systems architecture, scalability, isolation and security, API and state-machine design, storage and synchronization, resiliency, observability, and compliance applied to two domains: a cloud IDE sandbox and a payment processing backend, with domain: System Design.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign Online Chess Matchmaking
This question tests the ability to design a distributed, low-latency matchmaking system that balances player skill (MMR), wait time, and network latency under high concurrency.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityConcurrencyDistributed Systems - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Online Chess Matchmaking and Clocks
This question tests your ability to design a real-time game backend, focusing on low-latency state synchronization, fair matchmaking, and reliable clock management in a distributed environment.
System DesignTechnical ScreenReal-timeConcurrencyWebSockets - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Payment Authorization, Capture, and Batch Settlement
Design a resilient payment processing platform supporting two-phase payment operations (authorize and capture), double-entry ledgering, and asynchronous batch settlement with external financial gateways.
System DesignTechnical ScreenPaymentsDistributed SystemsLedger - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign Photo Storage with SHA-256 Content Deduplication and Safe Deletion
Design a photo storage service that deduplicates identical uploads by their SHA-256 content hash. Cover the upload flow with server-side verification, concurrent identical uploads, deletion with reference counting and garbage collection, and the privacy risks of deduplicating across users. It tests content-addressed storage design.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign Power-Grid Device Monitoring over Unreliable Networks: Dedup and Late Events
Design a monitoring platform for power-grid devices that report readings and upload logs over unreliable public networks. Ingestion must be idempotent, deduplicate retransmissions, handle out-of-order and late events and accept batched uploads. It tests IoT ingestion, event-time processing and resilience to reconnect storms.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign Real-Time Electricity Monitoring and Policy Control
Design a distributed real-time electricity monitoring and policy actuation system that ingests high-throughput telemetry, evaluates dynamic load-shedding policies with hysteresis, and reliably issues auditable commands to edge devices.
System DesignTechnical ScreenStream ProcessingIoTDistributed Systems - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Slack-like messaging platform
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, secure, real-time messaging systems, testing competencies in distributed systems, data modeling, API design, storage and sharding strategies, search indexing, and notification delivery.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Slack-like multi-tenant global messaging system
This question tests the ability to design a global, multi-tenant messaging platform that handles high-concurrency real-time delivery, data isolation, and low-latency synchronization across distributed environments.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsMulti-tenancyReal-time - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Video Generation Orchestration
This system design question tests a candidate's ability to architect asynchronous, distributed job-orchestration pipelines at scale. It evaluates practical knowledge of durable queues, state machines, reliability patterns like the outbox and idempotency, and trade-offs between throughput and latency in GPU-constrained systems.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a CI/CD pipeline with scheduler
An OpenAI software-engineering system design interview question: design a production-grade CI/CD pipeline for a large microservices monorepo, end to end. It spans source-control triggers, build and artifact management, layered testing with flaky-test handling, progressive deployment and rollback, observability, supply-chain security, and — the differentiator — the job scheduler that orchestrates pipeline steps (DAG modeling, concurrency, priorities, retries, caching, rate limiting) plus its data stores, queues, APIs, schemas, multi-tenant fairness, KPIs/SLOs, and failure handling.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a CI/CD system with live log streaming
This question tests the ability to design a distributed job orchestration system that handles task dependencies, secure execution, and low-latency log streaming at scale.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsCI/CDInfrastructure - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a CI/CD system with stuck-job handling
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed job scheduling and orchestration system that handles process failures, network partitions, and job timeouts to ensure reliable execution in a high-scale environment.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsFault ToleranceCI/CD - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Chat Assistant Inference Service: Streaming, Free-Tier Limits, GPU Scheduling
Design the serving system for a chat assistant built on a large language model: stream replies token by token, rate-limit a free tier alongside paid users, schedule requests onto GPUs efficiently, and meet latency targets. It tests streaming protocols, batching, GPU memory limits, rate limiting and overload handling.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a ChatGPT-like web chat UI
This problem evaluates your ability to design a performant, scalable front-end architecture for a real-time conversational AI interface, focusing on state management, streaming data handling, and network resilience.
System DesignTechnical ScreenFrontendArchitectureStreaming - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud DevBox Platform
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, secure cloud development platforms, testing competencies in distributed systems architecture, orchestration and scheduling, storage and persistence, multi-tenancy and RBAC, runtime isolation, and operational observability.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud Development Environment
Design a secure, multi-tenant cloud development environment platform that provisions isolated compute instances, supports low-latency interactive editing, and reliably persists workspace state across disconnects.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsCloud InfrastructureContainers & Virtualization - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud Development Environment Platform Like an Online IDE
Design a cloud development environment platform, like an online IDE, where developers open a repository in a hosted workspace with a browser editor, a terminal and forwarded ports, then stop and resume it later. It tests sandbox isolation, workspace storage, fast startup, secure connectivity and cost control.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud IDE That Edits and Runs Code in Browser-Accessible Workspaces
Design a cloud IDE in which developers edit and run code and use a terminal in the browser while their files and execution environments live on remote servers. It tests workspace lifecycle and cold starts, isolation of untrusted code, durable file storage, real-time editor and terminal channels, host scheduling, and failure handling at scale.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud IDE With SSH Access Where One or More Users Share a Host
A system design question about building a cloud IDE in which developers get SSH access to remote development hosts, and a host can be used by one person or shared by several. It tests host lifecycle management, connection routing through a gateway, workspace persistence, multi-user access control and isolation.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Content-Addressed Photo Storage Service
Design a scalable, content-addressed photo storage service with cryptographic verification, resumable chunked uploads, reference-counted deduplication, and protections against unauthorized hash-probing attacks.
System DesignTechnical ScreenObject StorageDeduplicationDistributed Systems - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Conversational AI Assistant
This question tests the ability to design a low-latency, scalable architecture for an LLM-based conversational assistant capable of handling concurrent user requests and streaming responses.
System DesignTechnical ScreenLLMScalabilityStreaming - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Devbox Service for On-Demand Remote Development Environments
System design question asking you to design a devbox service that gives engineers on-demand remote development environments. It tests scoping requirements before architecture, the devbox lifecycle, fast provisioning, persistent workspaces, idle cost control, isolation, connectivity and failure recovery.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Digital Game Distribution Platform
Design a high-scale game distribution platform covering reliable payment and entitlement tracking, content-addressed binary chunk distribution, offline license leasing, and canary rollouts.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designdistributed-systemscdn - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Digital Game Store and Distribution Platform Like Steam
A system design interview question asking you to design a digital game store and distribution platform like Steam, covering the catalog, purchases, player libraries, and game downloads and updates. It tests content delivery for very large builds, entitlement consistency with payments, and handling traffic spikes during sales and launches.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Crossword Solver
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed system capable of solving large-scale constraint satisfaction problems (crossword puzzles) by partitioning search spaces and managing state across workers.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsBacktrackingConstraint Satisfaction - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Rate Limiter
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsRate LimitingRedis - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Fair-Queueing Image-Upscaling Service, One GPU per Job
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.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designschedulingfair-queueing - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Fault-Tolerant Online Chess Service
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsWebSocketsEvent Sourcing - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Fault-Tolerant Video Generation Platform
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsFault ToleranceAsynchronous Processing
OpenAI