OpenAI Interview Experiences & Questions
26 real OpenAI interviews shared by candidates: every round, the questions they were asked, how they answered, and whether they got the offer. Latest: Jul 2026.
What to expect at OpenAI
Based on 26 real interviews
By role
The OpenAI interview process
Most common round types: Behavioral (16), Technical (10), System Design (10), Coding (9), Cross-Functional (8), Project Discussion (7).
Real OpenAI interview questions
- Tell me about the most difficult product launch you've had.
- Solve this delivery-rate style coding problem in the live coding screen.
- You have technology that translates speech or text into animal language. You're a startup and want to get it to market. What do you do?
- Rapid fire of product and project decisions
- Design a job scheduler.
- We launched a feature and some metrics went red while others went green. How would you think about the user experience, and would you recommend launching it?
- You have invented a memory machine. Go to market.
- 10x the model capability, 10x the cost. Go.
- Walk me through the presentation you submitted for the data challenge.
- Build a semantic search system over Amazon products so ChatGPT could access it.
- Solve this timed HackerRank problem and then handle the harder second part.
- Pick a project and walk me through it.
- Given behavioral data from a feature launch or A/B test, how would you define success metrics and decide whether the launch was successful?
- Here is a transformer implementation with four annotated regions. Find the bug in each one.
- Walk me through a technical challenge and how you executed.
- What was your biggest failure?
- Implement encode and decode for a list of strings.
- OpenAI is launching AirPods-like hardware with built-in voice AI. Define the goals and metrics for success.
- Explain a technical system you've designed and implemented. Whiteboard it.
- Design a high-scale chat application.
- How do you explain p-value?
- Using only what's public, what do you think OpenAI's strategy for fine-tuning should be?
- What metrics and counter-metrics would you use, and how would you know customers are seeing ROI on the spend?
- Here is some modular AI-generated SQL or Python. What is the logic, and what is wrong with it?
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with someone, or had to move forward when another team was not aligned.
- Build a chatbot-style chat interface using classes.
- You have a text-to-music capability. What would you do with it?
- Prepare a presentation that recaps a project you completed. Present as if you're speaking to the executives.
- Design Slack.
- We want to redesign a product interface and add new features. How would you go about it?
- Imagine you're leading the rollout of the newest model, like GPT-6, in ChatGPT. How would you launch it?
- What is your take on AI, and how do you think we'll use AI?
- What's one thing on your resume you want to talk about?
- OpenAI wants to launch a collaborative workspace for teams inside ChatGPT. What metrics define success?
- Walk me through a technical challenge that you solved.
- Given a map of key/value pairs and helper methods to convert strings to bytes and back, how would you efficiently store that state in the cloud and retrieve it?
- Imagine that Open AI has recently built a home pod type device with ChatGPT for public spaces like hotels, offices, restaurants. The prototype is done and ready to launch. You're the PM for home pods, what goals would…
- What is your take on OpenAI? Why OpenAI? Why AI? How can AI help, and how can it go wrong?
- Why do you want to work at OpenAI?
- How do you partner with sales?
Showing 40 of 111 questions. Open any experience for every question and how the candidate answered.
All 26 OpenAI interview experiences
“Good prompts from the interviewer, they want to move through metrics quickly so they can get to second prompt around tradeoffs”
“So far straightforward phone screen. Prepped background and interests well and tried to speak to the role in a bit of detail.”
“It was very clear overall and well supported by the recruiters. The only confusion was when giving the final presentation, I was told it was geared towards internal teammates. Then the interviewer…”
“It was very conversational. The recruiter call was pretty easy and direct. The next round was with two interviewers and I was given 45 minutes to dive deep into a technical challenge or program I…”
“The question seems deceptively simple but its very hard to understand how to start and stay structured.”
“The weirdest part was that the take home was basically the job. I had to build a semantic search setup over Amazon products for ChatGPT, then walk that same solution back to the team because that is…”
“It was very rigorous but the recruiter was actually accurate and helpful about what to prepare, which is rare and I really appreciated that. The process consisted of a system design interview and a…”
“The problem was challenging. There were many conditions you had to satisfy and some aspects were a bit underspecified. The interviewers were stone faced and gave zero commentary. I ended up making a…”
“The process was short-lived for me, unfortunately. The coding interview was an hour long, and the question was similar to the game of life, but for an infection spreading across a 2D array. I…”
“The bar is pretty high, but the process is very smooth. The coding and system design need to be completed fast.”
“I expected the AI safety interview to be super guarded, but the engineer was actually really open about his views on regulation and what AI safety should mean. It ended up feeling more like a lunch…”
“The recruiter told me comp was 'beyond competitive' and 'never a concern,' then immediately said they usually downlevel people by one or two levels. I'd never had any company say that out loud on…”
“It was two back to back phone interview. In the first interview, it was debugging the problems in sharded matmul with communications, and make sure the training loss converges. For the second…”
“By the time I got to OpenAI, I’d interviewed with 11 or 12 companies, so my behavioral was very well rehearsed. I kept openings in my answers so if they followed up, they’d go where I wanted them to…”
“Both product sense rounds followed this exact theme of, "we have this magical technology, help us figure out what to do with it," and one prompt was literally speech to animal language. It was…”
“One thing that stood out was the SQL round. They gave me this AI-generated, very modular code and asked me to read the logic like a human, then basically debug what the machine was doing wrong.”
“The recruiter was kind and well organized. The product sense question was unique and fun to solve. The execution question threw me through a loop. I assumed OpenAI carefully released models for…”
“Pretty standard product sense and product analytics interviews, similar to Meta-style PM interviews.”
“One interviewer literally opened with, “I don’t know why I keep getting booked for these,” and then asked me how I’d handle launching a new model if the first two years would lose $2 trillion. I was…”
“The recruiter said to expect LeetCode medium hard, but I got this very practical Excel problem around formulas, caching, and invalidation. The most unique part was the project deep dive where they…”
“The coding plus ML stats round was the hardest by far. They basically asked me to implement an all_gather on noisy nodes, derive how many rounds you’d need for a target error, then figure out a…”
“Coding round went fine. Need to get to a working solution fast before polishing or optimizing approach. For the system design need to cover both frontend and backend pieces. Focusing on just one…”
“Pretty tough, long, and drawn out.”
“They gave me all the behavioral questions ahead of time, so I almost relaxed a little, and then more than half of every interview was just follow-up questions. It felt like they didn’t really care…”
“Funnily enough, I work at Replit, and even for our interviews we have candidates use AI. What you're testing now isn't correctness of code, it's whether someone can reason about the code that gets…”
“This was one of the hardest loops I had completed. The hiring manager screen and behavioral interviews were standard. The system design interview for a TPM was challenging. The expectations for a…”
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are in the OpenAI interview?
Candidates report a typical 3 rounds, usually including a recruiter screen, online assessment, phone screen, take-home assignment.
How hard is the OpenAI interview?
Candidates rate it 3.7/5 on average (difficult), across 26 interviews.
How long does the OpenAI hiring process take?
About 3 weeks from first contact to decision, based on reported timelines.
What percentage of OpenAI candidates get an offer?
6% of candidates with a final result got an offer (1 of 18).
What does the OpenAI interview focus on?
The most common round types are Behavioral, Technical, System Design, Coding.