Design a Multi-Tenant Online IDE
Company: OpenAI
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a browser-based online IDE for multiple enterprise tenants. Each tenant is an organization with its own users, projects, source files, secrets, permissions, and compute quota. Users should be able to create projects, edit and save files, compile or run code in a sandbox, and view output in the browser. The main discussion focus is multi-tenancy.
Discuss:
- the core APIs and data model
- how tenant identity is propagated through the system
- isolation of code, storage, secrets, and runtime execution across tenants
- per-tenant quotas, rate limits, and protection against noisy neighbors
- scheduling and sandboxing of code execution
- storage choices for source files, build artifacts, and execution logs
- how the system scales from small tenants on shared infrastructure to large tenants that may need dedicated capacity
- reliability, observability, and security considerations
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design skills for multi-tenant platform architecture, specifically assessing competency in tenancy isolation, identity propagation, resource and quota management, sandboxed runtime scheduling, storage strategies, observability, and security.