System Design Interview at OpenAI

Interviewing at OpenAI for L4/L5 SWE (non-ML). Have the onsite soon. Trying to prepare for the system design interview. Not sure if it's likely to be a typical question like you'd see in other tech companies (large scope / ambiguity, have to outline a broad design and then find some piece to narrow in on), or a bit more low-level / well-scoped question. My hunch is the latter, and that in this sense it will be different than other tech companies. Trying to figure out what are good materials to prepare from, since my distributed systems knowledge/experience is limited (I'm quite early-career). I don't have time to build a huge trove of knowledge & experience that I lack -- but I do have time to brush up on a few core concepts (scalability, replication, etc.) that would set a good foundation. The other interviews have all been basic coding so far -- I feel they tend to ask relatively simple, well-scoped questions, so you just have to know a few fundamentals really well to nail them, rather than having super broad and extensive knowledge. The recruiter gave me this resource to study from: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer Even that is a pretty broad spectrum (even the recruiter said it's more than you need), and I don't want to get lost in it / not sure how to practice applying that knowledge. So I'm trying to get a better sense of how to best prepare -- ideally from folks at OpenAI / familiar with their interviewing philosophy, but other opinions welcome too. #OpenAI #SystemsDesign

donnemartin/system-design-primer

GitHub