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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 3961–3990 of 5874 results
- 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 - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a parser for a hypothetical language
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - 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 - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a persistent key-value store
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a response-ranking ML system
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.
ML System DesignTechnical Screen - 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 - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a social network with snapshots
This problem tests your ability to design a memory-efficient versioned graph structure that supports efficient edge retrieval at arbitrary points in time.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenGraphData StructuresVersioning - 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 enterprise RAG assistant for internal docs
This question evaluates expertise in designing and training Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, including retriever, evaluator (reranker/verifier/filter), and generator components, with emphasis on model architecture choices, training objectives, data preparation under privacy and document-permission constraints, and evaluation strategies for grounded answers with citations. It is commonly asked to probe advanced ML system design and operationalization skills for mitigating hallucination, stale or conflicting sources, and long-document retrieval; the category is ML System Design and the level is practical application-focused with detailed modeling and training considerations.
ML System DesignTechnical Screen - 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
OpenAI