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 an Offline Merchant Payment System with Reconciliation
Prepare for a OpenAI system design interview about design an offline merchant payment system with reconciliation. This question focuses on requirement...
Design a Cloud DevBox Platform
Design a cloud DevBox platform: a service that gives developers disposable or persistent remote development machines, accessible through a browser, SS...
Design a Slack-Like Messaging System
Design a Slack-like team messaging system focused on sending and receiving messages in real time. Your design should support workspaces with channels ...
Filter Bad Human Annotations
This question evaluates expertise in data quality and annotation filtering for machine learning, including annotator reliability modeling, noisy-label...
Design a Payment Processing System
This system design question evaluates a candidate's ability to architect a backend payment system that stays correct under retries, concurrency, and p...
Derive Backpropagation for Matrix-Product Layers
Consider a neural-network block whose output is produced by multiplying a sequence of trainable weight matrices together, then applying the resulting ...
Mine Novel Images from Unlabeled Data
Design a machine learning system that mines novel or interesting images from a massive, unlabeled image corpus. The corpus is far too large for exhaus...
Design a CI/CD pipeline with scheduler
Design a production-grade CI/CD pipeline (with its job scheduler) You are designing the internal CI/CD platform for a large engineering organization t...
Design a ChatGPT Playground
Design a web-based AI playground — a prompt-testing console similar to the OpenAI / ChatGPT Playground. A signed-in user types a prompt, picks a model...
Defend a Research Direction and Experiment Design
You are interviewing for a research-focused Machine Learning Engineer role at a frontier AI lab. The onsite includes a collaboration / research-discus...
Design CI/CD Build Caching
This question evaluates design skills around CI/CD build caching, including distinguishing cache types (dependency caches, compiler outputs, container...
Design an SSH-Based Cloud Development Environment
Design an SSH-Based Cloud Development Environment Design a cloud development environment that is accessed by SSH rather than through a browser. Users ...
Debug a Broken Transformer
This question evaluates proficiency in debugging and reconfiguring Transformer-based deep learning models, covering competencies in model internals (a...
Design a Text-to-Video Generation Service
This question evaluates understanding of ML system design, distributed scheduling, durable asynchronous job pipelines, GPU resource orchestration, and...
Find and Count Maximum-Score Grid Paths
Find the maximum-scoring path from a fixed top-row cell to the last row of a grid using diagonal, downward, and limited two-row jump moves. Return the...
Aggregate Recent Message Events And Active Chats
Prepare for a stateful event aggregation coding prompt over chat events and active chats in a rolling five-minute window. The question is useful for d...
Debug and fix a PyTorch Transformer training loop
Minimal Causal LM Debugging and Optimization You are given a tiny causal decoder-only language model implemented in PyTorch. It appears to "train" but...
Design a Distributed Crossword Solver
This question evaluates competency in distributed systems design, algorithmic search and constraint satisfaction (e.g., DFS with constraint propagatio...
Design First-Fit and Best-Fit Memory Allocation
Design First-Fit and Best-Fit Memory Allocation Design a simplified allocator over one contiguous arena of N bytes. It supports: - allocate(size, stra...
Design a free-month experiment
An online subscription product is considering a promotion that gives eligible new users their first month free instead of charging immediately. Design...