Frontier AI Technical Interview Question Bank

Topic tags
Data structures
ML / AI
Product design

Reported interview periodNov 2025–Mar 2026

Design an Enterprise Retrieval Chat System

Design a multi-tenant assistant that answers employees' questions from their organization's private documents and cites the passages supporting each answer.

Practice focusRequirements - Cover document ingestion, parsing, chunking, embedding, indexing, retrieval, reranking, generation, and citations. - Enforce document permissions at retrieval time, including group changes and revoked access. - Refresh changed documents without serving mixed or stale versions longer than a defined bound. - Isolate tenants, encrypt sensitive data, and make access auditable. - Handle empty, conflicting, stale, or low-confidence retrieval without inventing an answer.…

Free practice

Topic tags
Data structures
ML / AI

OpenAISystem designAI-generated

Discussion / designResponse prompt

Reported interview periodJan 2026–Mar 2026

Design retrieval and ranking for a knowledge assistant

Design the retrieval and ranking system for an assistant that answers questions over a large, frequently updated document collection. The system must return relevant supporting passages with low interactive lat…

Practice focusScenario Design the retrieval and ranking system for an assistant that answers questions over a large, frequently updated document collection. The system must return relevant supporting passages with low interactive latency and provide enough evidence for the answer to be inspected. Assume tens of millions of passages, multiple languages, access-controlled documents, and a stream of new or edited content. Goals - Retrieve relevant passages for both keyword-heavy and semantic queries.…

Free practice

Topic tags
ML / AI

OpenAISystem designAI-generated

Discussion / designResponse prompt

Reported interview periodOct 2025

Design a Hosted Model Playground

Design a web application where users enter a prompt, adjust generation parameters, and receive a streamed completion from one of several hosted models.

Practice focusRequirements - Define APIs for generation, streaming, cancellation, model discovery, and saved presets. - Validate parameter ranges and enforce per-user rate, token, and spend limits. - Route to model backends with timeouts, retries, load shedding, and clear partial-failure behavior. - Protect against abuse while preserving prompt privacy and configurable data retention. - Record enough metadata for latency, quality, and cost analysis without exposing sensitive content. - Support experiments that compare two models or configurations fairly.…

Free practice

Topic tags
Storage & state
Reliability
ML / AI
Product design
Communication

OpenAIHiring managerHalf AI-generated

Discussion / designResponse prompt

Reported interview periodNot available

Product judgment under ambiguity

A team can improve model quality, reduce latency, or make failures easier to understand, but can fund only one this quarter. Choose a direction, state the users and evidence behind it, and define what would inv…

Practice focusPreparation - Write the user or stakeholder, the constraint, and the decision in one sentence each. - Choose one measurement or observable fact that can support the answer. - Name one alternative and the reason it was not selected. Review checklist 1. Did I state the concrete constraint before describing the solution? 2. Did I separate my own decision and work from the team's work? 3. Did I name evidence or a measurement rather than relying on confidence? 4. Can I answer every follow-up without changing the original facts? Staged follow-ups 1.…

Public brief

Topic tags
ML / AI
Product design
Communication

OpenAISystem designAI-generated

Discussion / designResponse prompt

Reported interview periodAug 2026

Design an interactive model-backed product feature

A collaborative writing product wants an assistant that can transform a selected passage according to a user instruction. The interaction should feel immediate, stream useful output, preserve user control, and …

Practice focusScenario A collaborative writing product wants an assistant that can transform a selected passage according to a user instruction. The interaction should feel immediate, stream useful output, preserve user control, and remain dependable when the model is slow, unavailable, or returns unsafe content. Design the feature from the client interaction through model serving and operational controls. Product requirements - Start visible progress quickly and stream partial output when possible.…

Public brief

Topic tags
Concurrency
Storage & state
ML / AI
Product design

OpenAISystem designAI-generated

Discussion / designResponse prompt

Reported interview periodOct 2025–Jul 2026

Design a Multi-User AI Assistant

Design the backend for a production chat assistant used concurrently by many customers. It should stream model output, invoke approved tools, preserve conversation state, and remain useful under model or depend…

Practice focusRequirements - Define APIs for creating conversations, sending messages, streaming events, cancelling work, and retrieving history. - Isolate tenants and authorize every history or tool access. - Orchestrate model calls and tool calls with timeouts, retries, idempotency, and bounded loops. - Enforce rate limits, quotas, content policy, and cost budgets. - Store message lineage, model/tool versions, and audit data without leaking sensitive prompts. - Set explicit latency, scale, durability, and availability targets.…

Public brief

Topic tags
Data structures
Concurrency
Storage & state
Reliability
ML / AI

System designSystem designAI-generated

Written response75–100 min

Reported interview periodN/A

Build a reliable job runner

Review staged prompts that begin with a small in-memory worker, then introduce retries, duplication, cancellation, and process restarts.

Practice focusState modeling, Idempotency, Retry policy, Failure recovery, Operational reasoning through a written response exercise.

Public brief

Topic tags
Reliability
ML / AI
Data / SQL

System designSystem designAI-generated

Written response70–90 min

Reported interview periodN/A

Design an evaluation artifact registry

Design a reproducible registry connecting datasets, evaluator configurations, model outputs, and reviewed results.

Practice focusData lineage, Versioning, Idempotency, Access control, Reproducibility through a written response exercise.

Frontier AI technical interview question bank.

Frontier AI technical interview question bank.

Design an Enterprise Retrieval Chat System

Design retrieval and ranking for a knowledge assistant

Design a Hosted Model Playground

Product judgment under ambiguity

Design an interactive model-backed product feature

Design a Multi-User AI Assistant

Build a reliable job runner

Design an evaluation artifact registry

Design an Enterprise Retrieval Chat System

Design retrieval and ranking for a knowledge assistant

Design a Hosted Model Playground

Product judgment under ambiguity

Design an interactive model-backed product feature

Design a Multi-User AI Assistant

Build a reliable job runner

Design an evaluation artifact registry