How OpenAI actually runs its system design round, the signature questions candidates report, and what interviewers probe. Part of the company-specific interviews index.
How OpenAI runs it. You may face system design twice: a practical screen and a deeper onsite round. For product-flavored prompts, stopping at a backend diagram is explicitly not enough: interviewers expect wireframes, an API contract, and a storage schema, and they probe depth aggressively on whatever you draw.
- Design the OpenAI Playground (front-end flows, API layer, and schema for thread and message history)
- Design an LLM-powered enterprise search system (a frequent senior-loop prompt)
- Design a notification system, Slack-style messaging, or a distributed job scheduler
- Design a streaming platform at scale
- Depth on demand: every component gets "why this, what breaks at 10x, how do you know"
- Full-stack thinking on product prompts: UI, API shapes, and data model together
- Scoping judgment: what you build first, defer, and stub, with sane back-of-envelope math
- Patterns to review: message queues, caching, sharding partitioning, api gateway
- Practice questions: Design distributed job scheduler, Design notification system, Design google search
- Full company guide: OpenAI system design interview