OpenAI Interview Questions

Build a key-value store as a single class. Layer on prefix-scan, TTL, then gzip persistence - each phase is its own surface area on top of the previous one.

The most-reported OpenAI coding problem. An in-memory key-value store where both keys and values are arbitrary strings - delimiters, newlines, unicode, anything. The on-the-wire format must round-trip them all.

A key-value store with timestamped writes. Read at time t returns the latest value written at or before t; later phases add arbitrary-order inserts and range queries.

LeetCode 1797. Tokens issued with a fixed TTL; renew before expiry to extend; count live tokens at time t. Later phases push the count to amortized O(1) and add thread safety.

Given a list of half-open meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms; later phases assign specific room IDs and add capped capacity with priority eviction.

Auto-simulate a turn-based team fight enforcing round order, dying-strike counterattacks, draw detection, and a full time-ordered event log.

A cell becomes infected on step t+1 only if it has at least K infected neighbors right now. Looks like rotting oranges but the K threshold turns it into a wave simulation with stall detection.

Convert dotted-quad to 32-bit integers and back, iterate forward and reverse over a range, parse CIDR notation, and decompose an arbitrary range into the minimum CIDR cover.

Count nodes in an n-ary tree using async fan-out. The recursion is trivial; the real test is fanning out child queries concurrently so wall-clock time scales with tree depth, not node count.

An iterator whose state can be captured and replayed - stop iterating, save the state, hand it to a fresh iterator, and continue from exactly where you left off. Layer composition over flat and nested data.

Cells hold literals or formulas that reference other cells. set_cell evaluates and caches each cell so get_cell is O(1); later levels propagate changes to dependents and reject updates that would form a cycle.

A stateful shell that supports POSIX cd semantics - absolute and relative paths, `.`/`..`, symlink resolution, and cycle detection. Looks simple, hides a stack-and-recursion problem.

Two shapes that often combine in the same interview. Historical-balance lookup (add/deduct stamped at a time, query balance as of t) and FIFO consumption with per-batch expiration.

Single-account GPU credit grants with time windows; FIFO partial spending and windowed balance queries.

A mutable social graph that has to do three hard things at once - answer point-in-time history without copying the world on every snapshot, and rank friends-of-friends recommendations both live and as-of a past snapshot.

A single-table in-memory database supporting INSERT and SELECT with WHERE (AND-only equality) and multi-column ORDER BY. The stable-sort trick is the trade tool.

Session-based auth with register, login, logout, session TTL, and salted password hashing. Paired with the TTL token variant in OpenAI loops.

The chunked-persistence follow-up to KV Store Serialize/Deserialize. Serialize a key-value store with a fixed-width binary (TLV) format, then split the blob into 1 KB chunks and checkpoint it to an S3-style object store - with the chunk count carried in a chunk header, no separate metadata object.

The concurrency follow-up to the in-memory key-value store. Many threads call put / get / erase on one shared store at once; make it correct under contention, then refine from a single global lock to a reader-writer lock and finally to atomic compound operations (get_and_set, compare_and_swap).

The durability follow-up to the in-memory key-value store. Snapshot the store to disk and restore it, then make the write crash-safe with an atomic temp-file rename, then add an append-only write-ahead log so writes made since the last snapshot survive a crash. Length-prefix encoding keeps arbitrary key/value bytes intact across disk.