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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
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- 11
- Topics
- 8
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Showing 1831–1860 of 2810 results
- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 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 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 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 - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign credit balance with vector-clock expirations
This question evaluates understanding of distributed-systems concepts such as vector clocks, partial orders, concurrency control and idempotency, plus practical competencies in data structures and algorithms for efficient per-user state management and correctness under concurrent operations.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign in-memory database API
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design and reason about in-memory data storage, indexing, query planning, and the underlying data structures and algorithms for insert and query operations.
System DesignTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign the GPU Job Scheduler for a Text-to-Video Generation Service
Design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant GPU job scheduler tailored for large-scale text-to-video generation workloads under sustained compute contention. The problem evaluates distributed resource allocation, multi-node gang scheduling, fairness guarantees, and preemption mechanics.
System DesignTechnical ScreenGPU SchedulingDistributed SystemsResource Management - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDispatch Parcels to Delivery Drones That May Go Silent Mid-Flight
Build an in-process dispatcher that hands delivery parcels to drones, reclaims a parcel when its drone goes silent, rejects stale reports from a drone that already lost its parcel, and quarantines parcels that fail too many times.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screenconcurrencystate-machinereliability - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDurable Session Cache: Byte Checkpoints, Segments, Thread Safety
A three-part exercise building a durable in-memory session cache: serialize entries to length-prefixed bytes and checkpoint them to disk, split the checkpoint into size-capped segments that reassemble by concatenation, then discuss making the class thread-safe. Tests byte-level encoding, exact round-tripping, and concurrency reasoning.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screenserializationpersistenceconcurrency - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerExpiring GPU Credit Ledger with Out-of-Order Events and Point-in-Time Balance
A two-part coding exercise to build a GPU credit ledger with expiring grants, usage deducted earliest-expiration-first, out-of-order events and balance queries at any timestamp, then avoid replaying from time zero on every query. It tests event ordering, heap use, checkpointing and invalidation when late events arrive.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerFault-Tolerant Task Queue with Retries, a Dead-Letter Queue and Task Dependencies
Implement an in-memory fault-tolerant task queue with enqueue, reserve, complete and fail operations, retries up to a configurable attempt limit, and a dead-letter queue for tasks that keep failing. A second part adds dependencies between tasks, testing state-machine design, efficient readiness tracking and handling of failed dependencies.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerFault-Tolerant Task Queue with Retry Cooldowns, a Dead-Letter Queue and Dependencies
Implement an in-memory fault-tolerant task queue with enqueue, reserve, fail and a dead-letter queue, where each failed task waits out its own cooldown measured from the failure time and returns in its original enqueue order. A second part adds task dependencies, testing state modeling, efficient scheduling and careful edge-case handling.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerFollow One-Way Links to the Endpoint Node or the Last Node Before a Loop Closes
Given one-way links in which every node has at most one outgoing link, follow the links from a start node and return the endpoint where the walk stops, or the last node visited before the walk would revisit a node. Tests single-successor graph traversal, visited-node bookkeeping and loop edge cases.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerGenerate Data Labeling Schedules
This question evaluates combinatorial reasoning and constructive algorithm design for generating constrained assignment schedules, including ensuring each human appears a minimum number of times, preventing duplicate human-task pairs, and managing valid ID ranges.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerHiring manager call: walk through your past work, interests and latest project
A hiring manager asks you to describe what you have built, what you want to work on next, and the project you worked on most recently, then describes their own team. Tests whether you can tell a concise career story, separate your own contribution from the team's, and defend the technical decisions of a recent project in depth.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerImplement A Contiguous Memory Allocator With Free-Block Coalescing
Design a fixed-size contiguous memory allocator supporting allocation and deallocation with immediate adjacent free-block coalescing.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenData StructuresIntervalsBinary Search - OpenAIEasySoftware EngineerImplement Chat Event Counter
This question evaluates data structures and algorithms competency, focusing on designing efficient in-memory counters and time-windowed event aggregation for (userId, chatId) pairs; it is categorized under Coding & Algorithms and has a practical implementation focus.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
OpenAI