Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
- 1,323 experiences
- 313 companies
- 37 roles
- +204 added this month
OpenAISoftware engineer“I still can’t tell if the final twist had a right answer, or if it was a test of how I handle something nearly impossible.”
OpenAIStaff Security Infrastructure Engineer · L6“The security question came down to making sure an agent can never access more than the user it’s acting for.”
OpenAIForward Deployed Engineer“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 basically what they work on.”
OpenAISoftware Engineer (New Grad) · L3“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 conversation with a very opinionated engineer than a normal behavioral.”
OpenAIProduct Manager · L8+“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 the very first call.”
OpenAIApplied Engineer, Backend“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 go.”
OpenAIProduct Manager, Fine-Tuning · L8+“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 actually really fun to work on.”
OpenAISenior Data Scientist (L5) · L5“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.”
OpenAIProduct Manager, ChatGPT · L5“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 like, what is this, bro?”
OpenAISoftware Engineer, Applied AI · L5“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 really tried to cut through the BS and ask what I actually did.”
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AnthropicSoftware Engineer, Safeguards · L5“The weirdest Anthropic round was the company values interview. It was almost like a therapy session, and honestly if you went to a therapist at some point, you will pass that round much more easily.”
NetflixEngineering Manager, Tooling“What was very unusual is they didn’t give me any tooling to draw the system design, so I just sketched it on a piece of paper and talked them through it, then we got into this oddly deep debate about whether hover-over history should count as a recommendation signal.”
