OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Interview Experiences

An OpenAI recruiter reached out to me directly, and the process was pretty focused compared to a normal SWE loop. The main pieces were a one-week take home, a live team discussion of that case study, and a separate AI-enabled coding screen that was basically an easy LeetCode problem. My take home was to build a semantic search setup over Amazon products for ChatGPT, and a lot of the evaluation seemed to come down to whether I could explain my decisions clearly and tie them back to customer needs. The coding round itself was not bad at all, but they still wanted me to speak to time complexity and memory. I made it to the onsite stage.

• Build a semantic search system over Amazon products so ChatGPT could access it.
• Solve this delivery-rate style coding problem in the live coding screen.