OpenAI Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 221 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Which role are you interviewing for?
30 roles · 221 reportsCandidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at OpenAI.
OpenAI
Software Engineer Infrastructure
Mid Very difficult Negative experience No offer 1 round About 2 weeks
Interview process
Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical System Design
This is the most disgusting and ridiculous interview I have seen in my 10 years of IT experience. First, this role had no clear JD (was told that it’s being fleshed out). The panelist confirmed that the role requires the knowledge of terraform, kubernetes. First round was a design round and here comes the most funniest part. I was told to build the API level design for a system. For developers and application architects, this absolutely makes sense. How many engineers who has infra knowledge is being involved in application architecture these days? They think they need gen agent to work with them and no clue on why they want to hire humans. Will never recommend people to appear for this company.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Design a system like GitHub and describe how a user would interact with it.
OpenAI
Knowledge Architect
Mid Difficult Neutral experience No offer 1 round About 2 months
Interview process
Recruiter call
Interview formats
Behavioral
I cold applied through their portal. I didn’t get the interview invite until over 2 months after applying, by which time I had pretty much forgotten about it. I only did a recruiter screening, which wasn’t particularly hard but was super fast-paced, we jumped right in and I felt like I was being hit with questions nonstop and that made it stressful. It’s a knowledge management role with their support team and it seemed like the main deal breaker was customer support experience.
Confirmed questions4 questions
- Tell me about yourself and what brought you here.
- What kind of experience do you have working with multiple stakeholders?
- Can you describe your past customer support experience?
OpenAI
Recruiting Coordinator
Entry Average Negative experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Phone screen Onsite
Interview formats
Behavioral
I had a first stage interview with the agency, then a second stage interview with a peer interviewer (another recruiting coordinator) who seemed genuinely engaged the whole time. They kept pointing out my experience, saying things like 'It’s great you have experience in X, that's what we need' and ended the conversation with 'I really enjoyed our conversation,' which made me feel hopeful. But only two hours later I got a rejection with no real feedback. Looking back, it all felt very insincere.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- "Roughly how many interviews or interview loops do you normally schedule in a week?"
- "Can you tell me about a time when you had to manage a really challenging or complex interview schedule?"
OpenAI
Research Scientist
Mid Very difficult Positive experience No offer 3 rounds
Interview process
Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding System Design Other
1. Coding & Algorithms Expect typical algorithm and data structure questions (similar to LeetCode). Focus is on clean code, optimal solutions, and clear reasoning. Example prompts: Implement a cache with O(1) access. Design a rate limiter. Solve graph traversal or dynamic programming problems. 2. Systems Design / ML Systems Design robust, scalable systems—often in AI/ML settings. Example prompts: How would you design a distributed training system? How do you deploy and monitor a large language model in production? 3. Machine Learning & Deep Learning (for relevant roles) Need deep understanding of models (transformers, diffusion models, etc.). Expect questions about training dynamics, loss functions, and optimization. Example prompts: Why does layer normalization work better than batch norm in transformers? How would you debug a model that's overfitting?
Confirmed questions1 question
- Design a user-facing product that uses GPT-4. How would you balance safety and usefulness when adding a new feature?
OpenAI Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from OpenAI interview reports.
“If a company has a $13 stock price, 17 million shares, $50 million of debt and $25 of cash, and similar companies are trading at a 25x EV/EBITDA, is this company a bargain or not?”
Read reports →“Build a spreadsheet where you can change a cell's value and it also refreshes other cells that depend on it, kind of like how Excel behaves.”
Read reports →“What kind of goal would you set for an AI-only social network that OpenAI is creating?”
Read reports →“If you booked a flight from Oakland to LA for a meeting and your executive missed it, what steps would you take to still get them to the meeting on time?”
Read reports →“How would you define success for OpenAI? What if all the instrumentation stopped working?”
Read report →“Explain your understanding of the difference between ChatGPT and the underlying GPT models.”
Read report →“In what ways do you think Generative AI can improve or better the world?”
Read report →“Can you explain encryption to both a technical and a non-technical person?”
Read report →“How would you design a scalable, efficient system to train a large language model, taking into account both computational and data constraints?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 221 OpenAI interview reports.