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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.
- 9403
- Questions
- 546
- Companies
- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 811–840 of 1189 results
- OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL Shortener
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.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityCachingDatabase Sharding - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a URL shortening service
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.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsDatabase ShardingCaching - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a User-Respecting Smart-Grid Controller
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.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designdistributed-systemsiot - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a crossword puzzle solver system
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenBacktrackingTrieConstraint Satisfaction - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a distributed crossword fill solver
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsConstraint SatisfactionBacktracking - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a fullstack app with frontend focus
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a metrics monitoring system, going deep on one or two components
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a minimal ChatGPT with presets
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a multi-device calendar application
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsData ModelingSync - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a multi-tenant CI/CD platform
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a multi-tenant Slack-like messenger
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a payment system with holds and batching
This question tests the ability to design a high-consistency payment processing system that handles asynchronous state transitions, authorization holds, and batch settlement workflows.
System DesignTechnical ScreenPaymentsIdempotencyDistributed Systems - OpenAIEasySoftware EngineerDesign a sandboxed cloud IDE
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable payment system
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a team chat system
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityWebSocketsDistributed Systems - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a text-to-video GPU job scheduler with one GPU per task and fair queueing
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an AI playground editor
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenReal-timeStreamingAPI Design - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Asynchronous Text-to-Video Generation Service
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.
System DesignOnsiteAsync ProcessingScalabilityJob Queues - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Instagram-like Feed System
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityCachingData Modeling - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Offline Merchant Payment System with Reconciliation
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.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsEventual ConsistencyPayment Gateway - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an On-Demand Cloud Notebook Service for ML Engineers
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.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designinfrastructurescalability - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an Online Chess Platform: Elo Matchmaking, WebSocket Moves, Game Clocks
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Online Chess Service from Launch to Scale
This problem tests the ability to design a real-time, stateful gaming system, focusing on concurrency control, low-latency communication, and fault tolerance.
System DesignOnsiteReal-timeConcurrencyWebSockets - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an Online Devbox Service for On-Demand Cloud Development Environments
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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an Online Development Box
Design an online devbox with authenticated workspace access, isolated code execution, persistent project files, reliable stop/resume, and controlled startup costs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an Online Multiplayer Chess Service with Real-Time Moves
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.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an SSH-Based Cloud Development Environment
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.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsCloud InfrastructureSecurity - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an in-memory database
This problem tests the ability to architect a high-performance, in-memory key-value store, focusing on concurrency control, data structures, and durability guarantees.
System DesignTechnical ScreenConcurrencyData StructuresCaching - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign an in-memory key-value database
Design an in-memory key-value database 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.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign coffee-shop card payments with tips and nightly batch settlement at scale
Design a card payment system for coffee shops where purchases are authorized at the counter, tips are added afterwards, and transactions settle in a nightly batch. The discussion centers on scaling nightly settlement, along with idempotent APIs, failure handling and reconciliation against processor reports.
System DesignOnsite
OpenAI