OpenAI technical screen: system design interview
Round 3 of 7 · 27 questions reported
- Length
- 60 min
- Format
- Design discussion, sometimes drawn in Excalidraw; for some roles, on the same day as the coding screen
- They grade
- A practical design with a concrete API and storage schema, and how you handle deep follow-ups
- Heads-up
- Questions are product-shaped (a notification system, a playground for prompts, an online chess site).
Questions OpenAI asks in this round 27
- Design a payment systemOct 2026 · very often
- Design a video generation service on a scarce GPU poolSep 2026 · very often
- Design an online chess gameSep 2026 · very often
- Design a sandboxed cloud IDEOct 2026 · often
- Design an image sharing service that stores each file onceAug 2026 · rarely
- Design a distributed crossword solverAug 2026 · rarely
- Design an AI chatbot appJul 2026 · rarely
- Design a CI/CD systemJun 2026 · rarely
- Design a Slack-like chat systemMay 2026 · rarely
- ML design for retrieval: embeddings, hybrid search and rankingMar 2026 · rarely
- Design Google CalendarJan 2026 · rarely
- Design TinyURLJan 2026 · rarely
- Design a webhook delivery systemNov 2025 · rarely
- Design a nearby points-of-interest servicePossibly retired · rarely
- Design a streaming AI feature for a large audienceAug 2026 · once
- Mine new information from a huge unlabeled image corpusMay 2026 · once
- Design a RAG system over company docsMar 2026 · once
- Design a distributed job scheduler
- Design a distributed power grid control system
- Design a distributed web crawler
- Design a GPU scheduling platform
- Design a rate limiter
- Design an LLM inference serving platform
- Design ChatGPT
- Design ChatGPT streaming with resumable responses and long conversations
- Design YouTube
- Evaluate a new LLM before launch
About the OpenAI technical screen: system design round
What does OpenAI ask in the technical screen: system design round?
The most asked: Design a payment system, Design a video generation service on a scarce GPU pool and Design an online chess game. 27 questions reported in all.
How long is the OpenAI technical screen: system design round?
About 60 minutes.
What is the OpenAI technical screen: system design round like?
Design discussion, sometimes drawn in Excalidraw; for some roles, on the same day as the coding screen. They grade: A practical design with a concrete API and storage schema, and how you handle deep follow-ups.