Design multi-tenant CI/CD workflow system
Company: OpenAI
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a multi-tenant CI/CD system that triggers on Git pushes. The system receives push information via an internal service API, including the repository ID and the current repository state. Workflows are defined as a sequence of jobs specified in a single YAML file located at a fixed path within each repository. Users must be able to view job output and execution status while runs are in progress. Describe the overall architecture, components for event intake, workflow parsing and execution, job scheduling, log/status streaming, and storage of run metadata. Explain how you would ensure tenant isolation, fairness, and fault tolerance.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates design skills for multi-tenant CI/CD platforms, covering event intake, workflow parsing and planning, orchestration and scheduling, runner isolation, live log streaming, and durable storage for runs, logs, and artifacts.