Design a distributed crossword solving service

Company: OpenAI

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Quick Answer: This question evaluates distributed systems and large-scale backend architecture skills, including task decomposition, scheduling, dynamic load balancing, fault tolerance, and state management for parallel search workloads in the System Design domain, and focuses on the practical application of architectural design and distributed coordination rather than purely algorithmic implementation. It is commonly asked to assess an engineer's ability to design APIs, orchestrators, worker fleets, and storage strategies that scale and remain correct under failures, demonstrating reasoning about task granularity, work stealing, and job completion detection for expensive combinatorial search problems.