I got into the process through cold outreach plus a referral, and even that took a month or two of pushing before I got the first interview. After a pretty normal recruiter screen, I had two same-day phone rounds: one coding and one system design. The onsite was four rounds for me: coding, system design, technical deep dive on my own project, and behavioral. My big takeaway is that the coding bar is much more intense than standard big tech and feels closer to Anthropic, while the system design and behavioral pieces are more familiar. I was still waiting on the decision when we talked, and the biggest wildcard in the whole process was interviewer variability.
I got sourced by a contractor first and then handed off to an actual OpenAI recruiter, which was a little unusual but pretty smooth. The process was a recruiter screen, then a first technical screen with one system design and one coding round, then a virtual onsite with only two more technicals plus behavioral, cross-functional behavioral, and a project deep dive. What stood out most was that the coding wasn't really LeetCode-shaped even though that was the prep guidance I got. The whole loop felt much more practical and scale-heavy than expected, and the project deep dive was easily the most probing part because they kept asking what I actually did and why. My main takeaway was that they want strong generalist problem solvers more than people who just memorize interview patterns.
A recruiter reached out to me cold by email, and the process itself matched what they told me almost exactly. I had a quick recruiter screen, then a long phone screen that was really two interviews back to back: a Playground design prompt and a coding problem around credits. After that I did a virtual onsite that was only three rounds, about four hours total, with a refactoring exercise, a past-project presentation with slides, and a leadership conversation. I ended up getting rejected, and the clearest signal I got afterward was that scale mattered a lot, especially in the project presentation round. One weird process detail is that a different recruiter reached back out to me again a few months later, so my impression was their internal tracking and cooldown handling were not especially tight at that point.
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 coding interview. The system design round focused on designing a payment processing system. The interviewer pushed beyond a basic design and spent a lot of time exploring failure modes, retries, idempotency, operational concerns, and correctness under real-world conditions. It felt closer to designing something that could actually run in production than many system design interviews I've done elsewhere.
The coding round was also fairly challenging. The problem itself wasn't especially difficult from an algorithmic perspective, but it required careful handling of edge cases and a precise understanding of the requirements. I felt like there was less emphasis on LeetCode-style tricks and more emphasis on building a correct, production-quality solution.
What went well was that the interviewers were engaged and clearly knowledgeable. The conversations felt collaborative rather than adversarial. What didn't go well, at least for me, was that I underestimated how much depth they expected around correctness and edge cases. In hindsight, I would have spent more time validating assumptions and thinking through failure scenarios before diving into implementation.
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 approached it much too methodically - explaining my approach before implementing, like I've learned to do from past technical interviews. The thing about this one is that theres FIVE long parts, and you have to pass the test cases for each part before you move on to the next. If I could do it again I would be frantically coding from the very beginning - waste no time. Add print statements to debug. The interviewer doesn't help or guide much, its mostly on you.
The bar is pretty high, but the process is very smooth.
The coding and system design need to be completed fast.
- Why join OpenAI?
- Design a chess game
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 interview, it was implementing a memory allocator in OS. You need to define the data structures and everything by yourself.
- ML Coding: sharded matmul debugging
- Memory allocator
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 piece might not help your case.
- Role overview and discuss experience and past projects
- Design OpenAI Playground
- Call backend streaming api and render responses in the chatbox - simulating chatgpt
