practice a little every day, paws crossed ♡
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.
- 9403
- Questions
- 546
- Companies
- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 781–810 of 1189 results
- OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Fleet Metrics Monitoring Platform, Then Go Deep
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.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designobservabilitytime-series - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a GPT chat UI with snapshots and sharing
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a High-Throughput Payment Authorization and Settlement System
This problem tests the ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant distributed system that bridges external payment processors with internal ledger state management.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsConsistencyPayments - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Highly Available Conversational AI Service
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Hosted Notebook Platform
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsContainersOrchestration - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Large-Scale Streaming AI Product Feature
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.
System DesignOnsiteStreaming APIsDistributed SystemsLLM Infrastructure - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Live Elimination Puzzle Arena With Spectators
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.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designreal-timewebsockets - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Live Riddle Showdown With Round Eliminations and Spectators
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.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designreal-timesharding - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Live Speed-Typing Arena With Mistake Lockouts
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.
System DesignTechnical Screenreal-timewebsocketsmatchmaking - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Live Trivia Buzzer Arena with Wrong-Answer Lockouts
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.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designreal-timematchmaking - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Multi-Tenant Online IDE
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenMulti-tenancySandboxingDistributed Systems - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Lifecycle from Hold to Charge and Settlement
This problem tests the design of a distributed, idempotent payment processing system that ensures data consistency and financial integrity across asynchronous state transitions.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsIdempotencyReliability - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Orchestration System
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.
System DesignOnsitePaymentsDistributed SystemsIdempotency - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Processing Service (Merchant to Payment Provider)
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsAPI DesignFinancial Systems - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Processing System
This question tests the ability to design a distributed payment processing system that guarantees atomicity and consistency under high concurrency and partial network failures.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsConsistencyIdempotency - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Processing System with Exactly-Once Charging
This question tests the ability to design a fault-tolerant payment system that handles distributed transactions, ensures idempotency, and reconciles state with external gateways.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsIdempotencyTransactions - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Processor with Holds, Charges, and Network Batches
Design a hold-and-charge payment processor with honest asynchronous results, durable deduplication, incremental network batches, and safe acknowledgment recovery.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Payment System
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment System That Charges Customers Through an External Payment Provider
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment System: Holds and Captures, Batch Charges, Reconciliation, Idempotency
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Photo Storage Service That Deduplicates Uploads by SHA-256 Content Hash
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Multiplayer Typing Race with Matchmaking and Spectators
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Multiplayer Typing Race with Typo Freezes and Fair Matchmaking
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Online Chess Platform
This question tests your ability to design a low-latency, stateful distributed system that handles real-time bidirectional communication and ensures strict move consistency.
System DesignTechnical ScreenWebSocketsConcurrencyReal-time - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Trivia Battle Royale Platform with Live Spectating
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Reliable Payment Processing System
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Slack-Like Messaging System
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Slack-like real-time messaging system
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, low-latency messaging system that handles concurrent message delivery, persistence, and synchronization across multiple devices.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityWebSocketsDatabase - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Sora-Style Video Generation Service with Fair Queueing and Cancellation
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Tier-Aware AI Video Generation Service
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsQueuesTask Scheduling
OpenAI