OpenAI ML System Design Interview Questions
Master your tech interview with our curated database of real questions from top companies.
Design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system
Prompt Design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that answers user questions using an organization’s internal documents (PDFs, wiki pages, ...
Design a chatbot fallback for unknown questions
Scenario You run a ChatGPT-like assistant. Users sometimes ask questions the model cannot answer reliably (unknown/uncertain/needs up-to-date facts). ...
Design an AWS fine-tuning platform for LLMs
Scenario You need to build a system that lets customers fine-tune their own large language model (LLM) on AWS. Task Design a managed platform where us...
Design and optimize a RAG system
Scenario You are building a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for question answering over an internal document corpus. Task Design the end-t...
Design a recommendation system end-to-end
Question Design a large-scale recommendation system (e.g., short videos or e-commerce items). Requirements - Personalized feed ranking for hundreds of...
Design an image/video near-duplicate detection system
Question Design a system to detect near-duplicate images/videos (e.g., reuploads, minor edits, different encodes) at large scale. Requirements - Suppo...
Design a harmful video content moderation system
Question Design an end-to-end system to detect and moderate harmful videos on a large platform. Requirements - Detect multiple policy categories (viol...
Select high-quality math documents from crawls
Scenario You have a web crawler that collects raw HTML/PDF documents. You want to build a pipeline that identifies high-quality math documents suitabl...
Design an OOD detection system
Prompt You are building a product that uses an ML classifier in production (e.g., for routing, ranking, safety, fraud, or categorization). Over time, ...
Design an enterprise RAG assistant for internal docs
Scenario Design an enterprise GPT-style assistant that allows employees to ask questions about internal company documents (policies, wikis, specs, tic...
Design an ML search system
Design an ML‑Powered Enterprise Document Search System Context You are designing a multi‑tenant enterprise search system that indexes documents from m...
Design an AI chatbot with browser storage
System Design: Browser-Only Chatbot With Streaming and No Server-Side Conversation Storage Context Design an AI chatbot where all user messages and co...
Design an enterprise RAG system
System Design Task: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for Enterprise Users You are designing a multi-tenant enterprise RAG system that answers user...
Design a GPU credit system and scheduler
Design a GPU Credit Accounting and Scheduling Service (Technical Screen) Context You are designing a backend service for an ML platform that runs trai...
Design a production RAG system
Design a Production RAG System for Enterprise Document QA Context You are designing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to answer questions ...
Design an End-to-End ML System
System Design: Real-Time Recommendation ML System Context You are tasked with designing an end-to-end machine-learning system that serves real-time re...
Design enterprise RAG search system
Design an End-to-End Enterprise RAG Search System Background You are tasked with designing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) search system for en...
Design AI chat bot system
System Design: In-Browser AI Chat With Streaming Requirements Design a web-based AI chatbot system that satisfies all of the following: 1. User messag...
Design an enterprise RAG system
System Design: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for Enterprise Context Design a production-grade, multi-tenant RAG platform for enterprise users. ...
Design a response-ranking ML system
System Design: Ranking Candidate Text Responses to Maximize User Satisfaction You are designing an end-to-end machine learning system that, given a us...