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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 1771–1800 of 2810 results
- OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerCompute Plant Infection Stabilization
This problem tests your ability to simulate state propagation across a grid over discrete time steps and determine the minimum number of interventions required to contain an infection.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenSimulationGridBacktracking - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerCompute Plant Infection Time
This problem tests your ability to model a grid-based propagation process using Breadth-First Search (BFS), specifically handling multi-source initialization and obstacle avoidance.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenBFSGraphGrid - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerContiguous Extent Allocator for a Storage Volume, Then O(log n)
Build an allocator that hands out contiguous runs of blocks on a fixed-size volume and takes them back with coalescing, first with a simple sorted list and then with logarithmic reserve and release. Tests splitting/merging logic, choosing indexes for size and neighbor lookups, and keeping them consistent.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screenallocatordata-structuresbalanced-bst - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerCount Connected Friend Groups
Determine the number of connected components in an undirected graph represented as an adjacency matrix using graph traversal or disjoint set union.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screengraphdfsbfs - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerCount Machines and Recover a Distributed Tree Topology
Implement a distributed tree discovery and aggregation protocol that counts reachable machines, recovers edges, handles network retries, detects unreachable subtrees, and validates tree invariants.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsTreeGraph Traversal - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDebug a Machine Learning Pipeline
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to diagnose production machine learning failures, covering competencies in data quality, data and concept drift detection, model versioning and deployment checks, and operational debugging within an MLOps context.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDebug a failing ML classifier
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to diagnose a poorly generalizing ML classifier, testing practical knowledge of data leakage, feature drift, and model calibration. It assesses applied machine learning debugging skills — including cross-validation design and error analysis — commonly tested in senior engineering and ML roles.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign CI/CD Build Caching
This problem evaluates your ability to design a distributed caching system for CI/CD pipelines, focusing on cache key strategies, invalidation, and storage scalability.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsCI/CDCaching - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign Command Dispatch and Telemetry Reconciliation for Unreliable Devices
Design a resilient control plane and telemetry reconciliation system for millions of intermittently connected edge devices, ensuring safe command execution, idempotency, and accurate state tracking despite network unreliability.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsIoTEdge Computing - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign First-Fit and Best-Fit Memory Allocation
Design an in-memory heap allocator supporting first-fit and best-fit allocation, block splitting, adjacent free block coalescing, and safe handle validation to prevent stale or forged free operations.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenMemory ManagementData StructuresLinked List - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign GPU credit allocator
A multi-tenant GPU credit allocation system design (OpenAI software-engineer system-design screen): track and deduct GPU credits in real time across many nodes, issue/transfer/spend credits via idempotent APIs, and enforce budgets, hierarchical quotas, rate limits, and fair-share with scheduler integration. Covers prepaid vs postpaid, an immutable double-entry ledger with reservations, overspend prevention, failure recovery, scaling, and observability.
System DesignTechnical Screen - 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 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 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 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 - 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 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 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
OpenAI