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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
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- 546
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- 11
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Showing 1621–1650 of 2336 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 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 - 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 - 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 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 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 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 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 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 - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Text-to-Video Generation Platform (Sora-style)
This problem evaluates your ability to design a distributed ML infrastructure that handles high-latency, resource-intensive inference jobs while ensuring scalability, reliability, and content safety.
ML System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsML InfrastructureTask Queues - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Text-to-Video Generation System
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable ML inference platforms, including GPU resource management and scheduling, asynchronous job orchestration and state-machine-driven job lifecycles, failure classification and recovery, artifact storage, rate limiting, and monitoring for quality and latency.
ML System DesignOnsite - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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
OpenAI