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Openai·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture·Senior

SeniorPrefer not to say
Jun 2026

Summary

System design round at OpenAI for a software engineer role. The interviewer was pretty no-nonsense and kept pushing on failure handling. Nothing catastrophic but nothing to brag about either.

Questions Asked (1)

Q1

Design a system similar to Sora, OpenAI's video generation platform.

System DesignTechnical Trade-offsAdaptability & Ambiguity
Author's notes

The bulk of the interview was really about failure modes, not the happy path.

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AI HintsAI Generated

Suggested Approach

Start by clarifying the scope and requirements of the video generation system, then outline a high-level architecture covering data processing, model training, and inference serving. Dive into key components like distributed training, efficient inference, and storage, discussing trade-offs and scalability.

Pro tip: Emphasize the unique challenges of video generation, such as temporal coherence and high computational demands, and propose concrete solutions like 3D convolutions or transformer-based architectures with efficient attention mechanisms.

1. Clarify Requirements

Ask questions to understand the expected scale, latency, quality, and use cases (e.g., text-to-video, video editing) to tailor the design.

2. High-Level Architecture

Sketch the main components: data ingestion and preprocessing, model training pipeline, inference service, and storage for videos and metadata.

3. Deep Dive into Key Components

Discuss the model architecture (e.g., diffusion models, transformers), distributed training strategies, and inference optimization techniques like model parallelism and caching.

4. Address Scalability and Reliability

Explain how to scale training and inference using cloud resources, handle failures, and ensure low-latency serving with load balancing and autoscaling.

5. Discuss Trade-offs and Future Work

Highlight trade-offs between quality, speed, and cost, and mention potential improvements like better temporal modeling or efficient sampling methods.

Key Points to Mention

  • Use of diffusion models or autoregressive transformers for video generation
  • Distributed training with data and model parallelism (e.g., Megatron, DeepSpeed)
  • Efficient inference techniques: quantization, pruning, and caching
  • Storage and streaming of large video files (e.g., object storage, CDN)
  • Temporal coherence and consistency across frames
  • Evaluation metrics for video quality (e.g., FVD, IS)

AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.