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
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
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hard
Design the inference architecture for a ChatGPT-like service to handle millions of concurrent users with minimal Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) and high throughput.
#Inference
#Scalability
#Concurrency
#Continuous Batching
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a fault-tolerant cluster orchestration system for training a 100B+ parameter model across 10,000 GPUs that can survive frequent node failures.
#Infrastructure
#Fault Tolerance
#Kubernetes
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design the serving infrastructure for ChatGPT to handle millions of concurrent users. How do you manage state, batching, and latency?
#Distributed Systems
#Inference Scaling
#Continuous Batching
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
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hard
How would you design a system to train a 100B+ parameter model across 10,000 GPUs? Detail the parallelism strategies you would use.
#Distributed Training
#3D Parallelism
#Network Topology
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a data pipeline to scrape, clean, deduplicate, and tokenize 10TB of raw web text data for LLM pretraining.
#Data Engineering
#MapReduce
#MinHash
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design an end-to-end RLHF pipeline. Walk me through the system architecture from human labeling interfaces to the final PPO training loop.
#RLHF
#Data Pipelines
#Model Training
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a system to detect and filter PII (Personally Identifiable Information) from a massive, continuously updating stream of training data.
#Security
#Stream Processing
#NLP
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design an evaluation framework for the continuous deployment of new LLM checkpoints. How do you ensure a new model doesn't regress on coding tasks while improving on creative writing?
#MLOps
#Evaluation
#Testing
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a multi-tenant vector database system to support embedding search for millions of users (e.g., for ChatGPT custom knowledge bases).
#Databases
#Information Retrieval
#Scalability
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
You are tasked with reducing the Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) and increasing the generation speed of an existing LLM API. Walk me through the specific optimizations you would implement.
#Inference Optimization
#Latency
#Hardware
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.