OpenAI
Leading AI research laboratory developing state-of-the-art foundation models like GPT-4.
5 Rounds
~21 Days
Very Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Data Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a data pipeline to ingest, deduplicate, and tokenize 10 petabytes of web text data for LLM pre-training. How do you handle exact and fuzzy deduplication at this massive scale?
#Distributed Systems
#Data Pipelines
#MinHash/LSH
#Spark/Ray
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time monitoring system for ChatGPT API latency and error rates. The system needs to aggregate metrics per minute, per user tier, and per model, handling millions of requests per second.
#Stream Processing
#Kafka
#Time-Series Databases
#High Throughput
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design an ETL pipeline that takes newly published research papers, generates embeddings using our API, and updates a vector database for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) without causing downtime.
#ETL
#Vector Databases
#Embeddings
#Idempotency
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a data ingestion pipeline to process petabytes of web crawl data (e.g., CommonCrawl) for LLM pre-training.
#Distributed Systems
#Data Ingestion
#Scalability
#Storage
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a near real-time telemetry system to track API token usage and latency across millions of ChatGPT users.
#Streaming
#Kafka
#Real-time Analytics
#Metrics
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed deduplication system to remove exact and near-duplicate documents from a 10TB text dataset.
#Algorithms
#Big Data
#MinHash
#LSH
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a pipeline to continuously update a vector database with new embeddings generated from daily news articles.
#Vector Databases
#Embeddings
#ETL
#Orchestration
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
How would you design a system to detect and scrub PII (Personally Identifiable Information) from training datasets at scale?
#Data Privacy
#NLP
#Distributed Processing
#Security
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Explain how you would model the data warehouse schema for tracking prompt and completion tokens across different API endpoints.
#Data Modeling
#Star Schema
#Fact/Dimension Tables
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a data pipeline to ingest, filter for PII, deduplicate, and tokenize 10PB of Common Crawl data for training a next-generation LLM.
#Big Data
#Distributed Systems
#Data Pipelines
#Spark/Ray
Data Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a real-time analytics and monitoring system for the OpenAI API to track latency, error rates, and token usage globally.
#Stream Processing
#Kafka
#Time-Series DB
#Monitoring
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
How would you design a highly available, low-latency system to track and enforce token rate limits for OpenAI API users across multiple global regions?
#Distributed Caching
#Redis
#Consistency
#Rate Limiting
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a pipeline to continuously ingest newly published news articles, generate embeddings using an OpenAI model, and update a vector database for a real-time RAG application.
#Vector Databases
#Embeddings
#Event-Driven Architecture
#RAG
Data Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Architect a system to collect, anonymize, and store telemetry and conversation data from ChatGPT clients for model fine-tuning, ensuring strict privacy compliance.
#Data Privacy
#Batch Processing
#Data Warehousing
#Security
Data Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design an automated evaluation pipeline that runs nightly benchmarks (e.g., MMLU, HumanEval) on the latest model checkpoints and alerts researchers to regressions.
#Orchestration
#CI/CD for ML
#Airflow
#Compute Allocation
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
How would you design a distributed web scraper to crawl millions of specific domains daily, ensuring data freshness while respecting robots.txt and avoiding IP bans?
#Web Scraping
#Distributed Queues
#Proxies
#Politeness
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.