Design a ChatGPT Playground
Company: OpenAI
Role: Frontend Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a web-based AI playground similar to a prompt-testing console.
The product lets users enter prompts, choose model parameters, save and reuse presets, and view generated responses. Discuss both front-end and back-end design.
Your design should cover:
- Core user flows for entering a prompt and receiving a generated response.
- Model parameters such as model choice, temperature, maximum output length, and other generation settings.
- Presets that let users save, load, update, and share reusable configurations.
- Front-end state management and streaming response rendering.
- Back-end APIs and data models.
- How to handle server failures, model-service failures, timeouts, partial responses, and retries.
- Observability, scalability, latency, and reliability considerations.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competence in designing scalable, reliable web applications with emphasis on real-time front-end interactions, API design, data modeling for presets, state management for streaming responses, and operational concerns like fault tolerance, observability, latency, and retries.