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
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the architecture for ChatGPT's web interface, focusing on real-time streaming, chat history persistence, and state management across multiple devices.
#Architecture
#Streaming
#State Management
#Databases
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a system to handle webhooks for OpenAI API fine-tuning jobs, ensuring at-least-once delivery and handling downstream customer endpoint failures.
#Webhooks
#Message Queues
#Retry Logic
#Distributed Systems
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a scalable prompt evaluation platform where enterprise users can run A/B tests on different LLM prompts across millions of dataset rows?
#Batch Processing
#Scalability
#Data Pipelines
#Analytics
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an API gateway that routes requests to different model endpoints (e.g., GPT-3.5, GPT-4) based on load, availability, and user subscription tier.
#API Gateway
#Load Balancing
#Routing
#High Availability
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design the database schema and backend architecture for storing and retrieving user chat histories with minimal latency, considering users might have thousands of long conversations.
#Database Design
#Indexing
#NoSQL
#Caching
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time collaborative prompt playground where multiple users can edit a prompt simultaneously and see model outputs, similar to Google Docs.
#WebSockets
#CRDTs
#Operational Transformation
#Real-time
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you architect a system to securely store, process, and manage user-uploaded files for the Advanced Data Analysis (Code Interpreter) feature?
#Security
#Storage
#Sandboxing
#Microservices
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed rate limiting system for the OpenAI API that enforces both Requests Per Minute (RPM) and Tokens Per Minute (TPM) globally across multiple data centers.
#Distributed Systems
#Rate Limiting
#Redis
#Eventual Consistency
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a logging and monitoring pipeline to track API latency, error rates, and token usage per customer in real-time.
#Observability
#Data Pipelines
#Metrics
#Elasticsearch/Prometheus
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Architect a plugin execution engine that safely calls third-party APIs based on LLM outputs while preventing Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) and timing attacks.
#Security
#API Integration
#Network Architecture
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.