OpenAI Software Engineer Interview Experiences & Questions
9 candidates share their OpenAI Software Engineer interviews: each round, the questions asked and the outcome. Latest: May 2026.
What to expect · OpenAI Software Engineer
Based on 9 real interviews
The OpenAI Software Engineer interview process
Most common round types: System Design (7), Coding (7), Behavioral (6), Technical (5), Project Discussion (3), Artificial Intelligence (2).
Real OpenAI Software Engineer interview questions
- Implement encode and decode for a list of strings.
- Design a job scheduler.
- What is your take on AI, and how do you think we'll use AI?
- ML Coding: sharded matmul debugging
- Solve this timed HackerRank problem and then handle the harder second part.
- Pick a project and walk me through it.
- Build a chatbot-style chat interface using classes.
- Design a high-scale chat application.
- What is your take on OpenAI? Why OpenAI? Why AI? How can AI help, and how can it go wrong?
- Memory allocator
- What's one thing on your resume you want to talk about?
- Design Slack.
- Tell me about a conflict or a technically complex problem you faced.
- Role overview and discuss experience and past projects
- Why do you want to work at OpenAI?
- 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?
- Can you talk about a project you did?
- Implement a GPU credit management system.
- Design a version of the OpenAI Playground for developers, from the UI screens through how it works under the hood.
- Why are you interested in OpenAI?
- Implement an iterator.
- Given issued credits, used credits, and rules like expirations, write the algorithm that computes a user's ending credit pool.
- Why join OpenAI?
- Tell me why you're picking OpenAI.
- Infection spread simulation.
- Tell me about a time you worked with a legal team or another team. How would you handle this scenario?
- Design a Stripe-like payment service.
- Implement Excel-like formulas across cells so updates propagate correctly to dependent cells.
- Design a streaming platform.
- Tell us about one of the most exciting projects you worked on.
- Here is some messy code. Refactor it so it can handle new requirements, while keeping the existing tests passing.
- Present the most technically challenging thing you've worked on.
- Tell me about a time you had a conflict with someone and how you resolved it.
- Design a Stripe-like payment processing system.
- Design a chess game
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with your boss.
- Design OpenAI Playground
- Call backend streaming api and render responses in the chatbox - simulating chatgpt
All 9 OpenAI Software Engineer interview experiences
“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 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…”
“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…”
“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…”
“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…”
“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…”
More: all OpenAI interviews · Software Engineer interviews at every company
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are in the OpenAI Software Engineer interview?
Candidates report a typical 2 rounds, usually including a recruiter screen, online assessment, phone screen, technical round.
How hard is the OpenAI Software Engineer interview?
Candidates rate it 3.7/5 on average (difficult), across 9 interviews.
How long does the OpenAI Software Engineer hiring process take?
About 2 weeks from first contact to decision, based on reported timelines.
What percentage of OpenAI Software Engineer candidates get an offer?
14% of candidates with a final result got an offer (1 of 7).
What does the OpenAI Software Engineer interview focus on?
The most common round types are System Design, Coding, Behavioral, Technical.