OpenAI System Design Interview Questions

Design a payment system that models credit/debit card processing for offline retail (e.g., POS/coffee-shop scenario — NOT an online Stripe-like gateway, unless…

Design a multi-tenant CI/CD system (similar to GitHub Actions) that automatically schedules and executes user-defined workflows in response to repository events. Canonical…

Design a Slack-like messaging platform. Core requirements: (1) Direct messages (1:1) and group channels; (2) Create new group chats and add users…

Design a ChatGPT-like interactive chat application end-to-end. Core requirements typically include: (1) Users type a prompt and submit it to establish a…

Design an online chess game platform similar to chess.com. The system must support: (1) player matchmaking — pair players of similar skill…

Design OpenAI Sora's end-to-end video generation system. A client submits a video generation request; the system must schedule, execute, and deliver the…

Design a cloud-based online IDE / sandbox environment. The prompt varies by variant but core requirements include: (1) Users can create, delete,…

Design a scalable Webhook delivery service. Users register a callback URL paired with an eventId. Whenever that eventId is triggered, the system…

Design a service/system to solve crossword puzzles. Input: (1) a crossword board with numbered cells indicating word start positions and directions (Across/Down),…

Design a machine learning system to discover, extract, and surface novel or high-quality data from a massive unlabeled dataset (images, medical records,…

Design a Place of Interest (POI) service similar to Yelp or Foursquare. The system stores registered places of interest, each with a…

Design a URL shortening service (e.g., bit.ly / TinyURL). Users submit a long URL and receive a short URL (e.g., https://short.ly/xK9p2) that…

Design and/or implement a web crawler system. Two main variants observed: (1) System design variant — Design a system to crawl and…

Design a video publishing and streaming platform similar to YouTube. The system should support video upload, storage, transcoding, and delivery at scale…

ML system design question covering one or both of: (1) Design a recommendation system (e.g., content/video feed ranking), and/or (2) Design a…

Design an AI Playground system (similar to ChatGPT but with a distinct UI) where prompts and responses co-exist in a single unified…

Design a calendar application similar to Apple Calendar or Google Calendar. Users should be able to create, view, and manage events. The…

Design an image sharing system where: (1) users can upload images and retrieve them by a unique ID; (2) if two users…

Design and implement a multi-shard data management system with shard balancing logic. The coding component involves implementing shard balancing using provided add_shard…

Design a machine learning system to automatically extract representative images from ChatGPT chat logs for newly emerged real-world concepts (e.g., Cybertruck, newly…

Design the OpenAI platform. The scope is broad — you are expected to architect a production-grade system resembling the OpenAI API/product platform.…

Design Slack with a focus on two major challenges: (1) Large channel fan-out — how to efficiently deliver messages to all members…

You have a large ML model (50GB–500GB in size) that needs to be deployed as quickly as possible to 1000 internal machines…

Design a stock trading platform similar to Robinhood. The system should support retail stock trading core flows — account management, order placement…

You are given one or more UI mockup screenshots of a web product. Your task is to transform those mockups into a…

Design a real-time sensor system end-to-end. Starting from sensor selection and use case definition, incorporate PM requirements, then reason through algorithm selection,…

Design a coffee shop ordering system. The interviewer frames it with a concrete in-store coffee shop scenario — not a general e-commerce…