OpenAI Interview Questions
Practice 274 real OpenAI interview questions for 2026 — real interview questions drawn from actual interviews with detailed solutions. OpenAI interview questions on this page span Coding & Algorithms, System Design, ML System Design, Machine Learning, and Data Manipulation (SQL/Python) and cover roles like Software Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, Android Engineer, and Frontend Engineer. For interview preparation expect a focus on production ML systems, scalable services, numerical correctness, experimental design, and communication: interviewers evaluate architecture decisions, tradeoffs, measurable impact, and the ability to ship robust systems under uncertainty. The loop runs stage-by-stage: a recruiter screen, a technical phone screen (coding or design), a virtual onsite with focused rounds (practical coding, system and ML design, model/debug deep dives, and behavioral/mission-fit), then team match and offer; typical timeline is about 4–8 weeks and difficulty is high. Practical coding leans toward real-world engineering problems rather than pure LeetCode puzzles. Software-engineer themes include consistent-hashing sharding, GPU job scheduling for text-to-video, payment systems with exactly-once semantics, and video orchestration. ML tracks emphasize resumable iterators and checkpoint/restore, streaming-entropy numerical stability, 1-NN implementations and debugging model backprop; data science focuses on churn, free-trial A/B tests, and SQL retention analysis. Use project deep-dives and worked examples when you prep.
"I got asked a hardcore MCM DP question and I saw it on PracHub as well. Solved that question in 5 minutes. Without PracHub I doubt I could solve it in 5 hours. Though somehow didn't get hired, perhaps I guess I solved it too fast? /s"
"Believe me i'm a student here jn US. Recently interviewed for MSFT. They asked me exact question from PracHub. I saw it the night before and ignored it cause why waste time on random sites. I legit wanna go back and redo this whole thing if I had chance. Not saying will work for everyone but there is certainly some merit to that website. And i'm gonna use it in future prep from now on like lc tagged"
"10 years of experience but never worked at a top company. PracHub's senior-level questions helped me break into FAANG at 35. Age is just a number."
"I was skeptical about the 'real questions' claim, so I put it to the test. I searched for the exact question I got grilled on at my last Meta onsite... and it was right there. Word for word."
"Got a Google recruiter call on Monday, interview on Friday. Crammed PracHub for 4 days. Passed every round. This platform is a miracle worker."
"I've used LC, Glassdoor, and random Discords. Nothing comes close to the accuracy here. The questions are actually current — that's what got me. Felt like I had a cheat sheet during the interview."
"The solution quality is insane. It covers approach, edge cases, time complexity, follow-ups. Nothing else comes close."
"Legit the only resource you need. TC went from 180k -> 350k. Just memorize the top 50 for your target company and you're golden."
"PracHub Premium for one month cost me the price of two coffees a week. It landed me a $280K+ starting offer."
"Literally just signed a $600k offer. I only had 2 weeks to prep, so I focused entirely on the company-tagged lists here. If you're targeting L5+, don't overthink it."
"Coaches and bootcamp prep courses cost around $200-300 but PracHub Premium is actually less than a Netflix subscription. And it landed me a $178K offer."
"I honestly don't know how you guys gather so many real interview questions. It's almost scary. I walked into my Amazon loop and recognized 3 out of 4 problems from your database."
"Discovered PracHub 10 days before my interview. By day 5, I stopped being nervous. By interview day, I was actually excited to show what I knew."
"I recently cleared Uber interviews (strong hire in the design round) and all the questions were present in prachub."
"The search is what sold me. I typed in a really niche DP problem I got asked last year and it actually came up, full breakdown and everything. These guys are clearly updating it constantly."
Design First-Fit and Best-Fit Memory Allocation
Design the core of a heap allocator over one contiguous managed region. Blocks have an address, size, and free/allocated state. Allocation requests sp...
Implement Masked Cross-Entropy with Label Smoothing
Implement numerically stable masked cross-entropy in NumPy with label smoothing and optional temperature scaling. Validate shapes, dtypes, finite logi...
Design the GPU Job Scheduler for a Text-to-Video Generation Service
This system design question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a resource-scheduling layer for scarce, expensive compute under sustained overlo...
Clarify and Design Social-Graph Milestones
Clarify and Design Social-Graph Milestones An interview exercise progresses through a social graph with snapshots, a milestone for retrieving follower...
Design a Payment Lifecycle from Hold to Charge and Settlement
Design a Payment Lifecycle from Hold to Charge and Settlement Design a payment system whose main lifecycle is hold, charge, then settlement. A hold re...
Design a Highly Available Conversational AI Service
Design a Highly Available Conversational AI Service Design a conversational AI service that accepts a user message and streams a generated response. B...
Count Machines and Recover a Distributed Tree Topology
Count Machines and Recover a Distributed Tree Topology A cluster's machines form a rooted tree. Design a protocol that returns the number of machines ...
Design an Online Chess Service from Launch to Scale
Design an Online Chess Service from Launch to Scale Design an online chess service. Players enter matchmaking, are paired into games, exchange legal m...
Return the Lexicographically Smallest Topological Order
Return the Lexicographically Smallest Topological Order Problem Implement topologicalOrder(nodeCount, edges) -> order. The directed graph contains nod...
Design a Payment Processing System with Exactly-Once Charging
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a payment system that guarantees exactly-once charging under network failures, retries, and du...
Implement 1NN with NumPy
This question evaluates implementing a 1-nearest-neighbor classifier with NumPy, testing skills in vectorized numerical computation, distance metrics,...
Design a Fault-Tolerant Video Generation Platform
Design a Fault-Tolerant Video Generation Platform Prompt Design an asynchronous video-generation platform. A user submits generation parameters, check...
Design a Payment Orchestration System
Design a Payment Orchestration System Design the merchant-side service that coordinates payment authorization, capture, refund, and status tracking th...
Implement a Recoverable In-Memory Key-Value Store
Implement a Recoverable In-Memory Key-Value Store Design and implement a single-process key-value store whose working set is held in memory and whose ...
Design an Asynchronous Text-to-Video Generation Service
Design an Asynchronous Text-to-Video Generation Service Design a service in which a user submits a text prompt, the system performs a long-running vid...
Compute entropy and implement 1-NN
You are given two short ML coding problems from a machine-learning engineer screen. Both are implementation-focused but probe whether you understand t...
Explain Why You Want This Company and Infrastructure Role
Explain Why You Want This Company and Infrastructure Role Explain why you want to join the company and why an infrastructure-focused software engineer...
Derive Sharded Matrix Multiplication and Backpropagation
Derive Sharded Matrix Multiplication and Backpropagation Consider Y = X @ W, where X has shape (B, D) and W has shape (D, H). Training runs on P devic...
Design a Distributed Rate Limiter
This question evaluates competency in distributed systems architecture, API and data model design, performance engineering, and operational concerns s...
Design GPU Scheduling for a Video Generation Platform
Prepare for a OpenAI system design interview about design gpu scheduling for a video generation platform. This question focuses on requirements, archi...