Design a distributed crossword solving service
Company: OpenAI
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Overview: 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.
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