Prepare for your OpenAI AI engineer interview

LLM system design and infrastructure cases calibrated to OpenAI’s safety-conscious, deployment-first engineering culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What OpenAI is looking for

System Design Interview

LLM Infrastructure Design

01API Rate Limiting & Quota Management

02Model Serving Architecture

03Reliability & Graceful Degradation

04Inference Cost Optimization

ML Engineering Interview

ML Systems & Evaluation

01Evaluation Framework Design

02Fine-tuning vs RAG Strategy

03Safety & Alignment Considerations

04Production Monitoring

Behavioral Interview

01Safety-First Thinking

02Ambiguity & Judgment

03Cross-Functional Impact

04Mission Alignment

Safety-conscious LLM system design//API rate limiting and quota fairness design//Production inference cost-reliability tradeoffs

Practice Library

OpenAI exercises

Ready to ace your OpenAI AI engineer interview?

Prepare for your OpenAI AI engineer interview

LLM system design and infrastructure cases calibrated to OpenAI’s safety-conscious, deployment-first engineering culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What OpenAI is looking for

System Design Interview

LLM Infrastructure Design

01API Rate Limiting & Quota Management

02Model Serving Architecture

03Reliability & Graceful Degradation

04Inference Cost Optimization

ML Engineering Interview

ML Systems & Evaluation

01Evaluation Framework Design

02Fine-tuning vs RAG Strategy

03Safety & Alignment Considerations

04Production Monitoring

Behavioral Interview

01Safety-First Thinking

02Ambiguity & Judgment

03Cross-Functional Impact

04Mission Alignment

Safety-conscious LLM system design//API rate limiting and quota fairness design//Production inference cost-reliability tradeoffs

How It Works

Master OpenAI AI Engineer Interviews

LLM infrastructure and evaluation system design cases, scored on OpenAI’s engineering evaluation dimensions. · Click to expand

1Your AI Engineer Goals

LLM System Design

Practitioner

Inference Optimization

Practitioner

2AI Engineer Case Prep

Design a rate-limiting system for the OpenAI API that handles 1M RPM with per-customer...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

OpenAI

3Frameworks

Framework

Is the inference serving layer the bottleneck?

Is GPU memory pressure evicting the KV cache?

GPU memory utilization: 94%; KV cache eviction rate up 800% vs baseline

Fallback to paged KV cache adding +240ms per request at p99

Is dynamic batching creating queue depth spikes?

P99 queue wait time: 12ms → 380ms under 10× load (SLA: <50ms)

Max batch size capped at 8 — tuned for <200ms SLA at 1× load, no auto-scale policy

Is the RAG retrieval layer adding latency under load?

Is the vector store throughput saturated?

Vector index hitting 7.9K QPS (limit: 8K) — 12% of queries experiencing retry backoff

Embedding server latency: 12ms → 85ms under load (embedding model not horizontally scaled)

Is context assembly triggering expensive context-window switches?

k=10 chunks × 512 tok = 5,120 context tokens, forcing 4K→8K context switch on 68% of requests

8K context window increases inference time 1.4× due to quadratic attention cost

Is semantic caching failing to absorb repeated queries?

Is the semantic cache similarity threshold misconfigured?

Cache hit rate: 22% vs expected 40% for FAQ-heavy traffic pattern at 10× load

Cosine similarity threshold set to 0.97 — nearest neighbors at 0.91–0.95 not being served from cache

4Feedback

LLM System Design

Distinctive

Inference Optimization

Strong

Evaluation Design

Meeting Bar

ML Diagnostics

Strong

Repeat

Practice Library

OpenAI exercises

Design a rate-limiting and quota management system for the OpenAI API that handles 1M...

LEARNHard

AI Infrastructure · System DesignOpenAI

Design an evaluation pipeline that measures hallucination rate, instruction following,...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

AI Infrastructure · Evaluation DesignOpenAI

Your model API's p99 latency spiked 3× after a canary deploy. GPU memory utilization is...

LEARNMedium

AI Infrastructure · ML DiagnosticsOpenAI

Tell me about a time you had to make a deployment decision with competing priorities —...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · Safety & JudgmentOpenAI

Describe a situation where you found and fixed a subtle failure mode in an ML system...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · Technical LeadershipOpenAI