OpenAI Interview Questions

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.

274 Questions 1 Company08.01.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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...

Software Engineering Fundamentals
21
1
143 people solved
Jul 27, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

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...

Machine Learning
57
0
489 people solved
Jun 27, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

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...

System Design
59
1
1061 people solved
Jun 26, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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...

System Design
3
0
31 people solved
Aug 1, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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...

Software Engineering Fundamentals
16
0
111 people solved
Jul 17, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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...

System Design
6
0
79 people solved
Jul 17, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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 ...

Software Engineering Fundamentals
18
0
211 people solved
Jul 3, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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...

System Design
9
0
83 people solved
Jul 17, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Return the Lexicographically Smallest Topological Order

Return the Lexicographically Smallest Topological Order Problem Implement topologicalOrder(nodeCount, edges) -> order. The directed graph contains nod...

Coding & Algorithms
2
0
18 people solved
Aug 1, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

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...

System Design
31
0
362 people solved
Jun 26, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Implement 1NN with NumPy

This question evaluates implementing a 1-nearest-neighbor classifier with NumPy, testing skills in vectorized numerical computation, distance metrics,...

Machine Learning
284
3
2695 people solved
May 19, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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...

System Design
2
0
24 people solved
Jul 19, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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...

System Design
2
0
23 people solved
Jul 19, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer

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...

System Design
16
0
114 people solved
Jul 5, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

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 ...

Software Engineering Fundamentals
5
0
48 people solved
Jun 29, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer

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...

Machine Learning
117
1
1116 people solved
Apr 24, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Easy
Software EngineerSenior+

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...

Behavioral & Leadership
5
0
59 people solved
Jul 16, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Design Video Generation Orchestration

Design a scalable system to orchestrate AI video generation (think Sora-style text-to-video). Users submit text prompts to generate videos. For each s...

System Design
32
0
445 people solved
Jun 12, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Distributed Rate Limiter

This question evaluates competency in distributed systems architecture, API and data model design, performance engineering, and operational concerns s...

System Design
902
3
6789 people solved
May 11, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Machine Learning 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...

Machine Learning
23
0
250 people solved
Apr 19, 2026

Frequently Asked Questions

How difficult are OpenAI interview questions for software and ML roles in 2026?
OpenAI interviews in 2026 are challenging but not purely puzzle-driven: they reward practical engineering, systems thinking, and domain depth. Expect coding rounds that favor real-world tasks (reading and modifying components, debugging, performance-minded implementations) over contrived LeetCode riddles, plus heavy system and ML design for senior roles. Difficulty varies by track: Software Engineer interviews emphasize scalable distributed systems and orchestration; Machine Learning and Research tracks dig deeper into math, experiment design, and paper-level reasoning. Overall the loop is selective; prepare for multi-hour virtual onsites and high bar on correctness, clarity, and tradeoff justification.
What is the OpenAI interview process stage by stage and where do different question types appear?
The process typically starts with a recruiter or sourcer screen (30 minutes) covering fit and logistics, then a technical phone screen or hiring manager call that mixes coding and role-specific questions. Many loops include a paid or take-home exercise in applied roles, then a virtual onsite of four to six rounds: coding/debugging, system or ML systems design, a technical deep dive on your past work, and behavioral/mission-alignment conversations, followed by team-match interviews. Coding and Algorithms and Data Manipulation show up in early screens and onsite coding rounds; System Design and ML System Design dominate senior SWE and MLE rounds; Data Scientist rounds focus more on SQL, experiments, and A/B analysis.
How should I schedule my preparation and what timeline is realistic before interviewing at OpenAI?
Plan a 4–8 week preparation block aligned to the role. Weeks 1–2: solidify fundamentals—data structures, Python or chosen language fluency, and SQL skills with joins, windows, and CTEs. Weeks 3–4: practice role-specific system problems and ML fundamentals—distributed systems, caching, consistency, and experiment design. Weeks 5–6: run mock onsites, do timed coding, and prepare technical deep dives (projects, papers, metrics). Final 1–2 weeks: polish behavioral stories, team-fit pitch, and revisit tricky system/ML topics like checkpointing, numerical stability, and orchestration. Allow extra time if you must rebuild ML coding from scratch or reproduce papers.
What specific subtopics and problem types recur for OpenAI roles (coding, system design, ML, and data)?
For Software Engineers expect distributed-systems themes such as consistent hashing rings with virtual nodes, GPU job schedulers for text-to-video workloads, exactly-once payment processing, versioned social follow graphs, and video generation orchestration. Machine Learning Engineers see resumable iterators with checkpoint/restore, streaming entropy and numerical stability, 1-NN implementations and matrix gradient tricks, debugging MiniGPT-style training, mining novel images, and noisy-annotator strategies. Data Scientists focus on SQL for repeat churn, free-month promotion A/B tests, signup/retention lift calculations, and experiment measurement. Mobile and frontend roles weight architecture (MVVM, Compose) and model-usage quotas.
What are standout preparation tips and common pitfalls to avoid for OpenAI interviews?
Emphasize production-ready thinking: write clear, testable code, explain failure modes, and design for observability and reproducibility. For ML/research tracks, be ready to discuss papers, experimental design, statistical power, and how you'd debug and reproduce training runs. Avoid over-optimizing for abstract puzzle tactics; interviewers want debugging instincts, tradeoff reasoning, and a path to shipable systems. Common pitfalls include ignoring edge cases (concurrency, exactly-once semantics), skimming data-quality implications in experiments, failing to justify metric choices, and not framing past work in terms of tradeoffs and measurable impact during technical deep dives and team-match conversations.

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