16 YOE, targeting Staff, the recruiter reached out to me.
Screen
Coding: GPU Credit
SD: Powergrid monitoring and control
VO
Coding: Rectangle board (add rectangles + check how many rectangles contain a point + undo)
SD: Realtime typing game (basically a variant of chess)
BQ: Why OpenAI? AI Safety, how to coordinate large projects across teams
Project Deep Dive: we just chatted casually about a past project
Three days later the recruiter told me I was rejected, without any feedback.
All I can say is the OAI bar is really high. I had seen all of these questions before and prepared well, and I felt I did well in the interviews. I went back over it carefully, and the only things I can think of are:
In the coding round, the interviewer gave me a hint at the end to get the last step working, but there were still less than 10 minutes left and we chatted for a long while afterwards. Could I really be failed for not figuring that out?
In the SD round I started out too fast and jumped straight into the design, got interrupted several times, and had to start over from the beginning. But in the end the interviewer also said this round was good, so at worst it's a minor communication flaw?
The BQ went well too, I talked with the manager and he told me a lot about the inside of OAI.
The deep dive is the only one I'm unsure about. The person interviewing me had very few YOE and had only been a Senior before. After I finished talking he asked a few half-hearted questions, all pretty shallow in my view, so I really don't know how he would write the feedback.
I've interviewed with OAI twice and failed both times. I probably don't want to interview with this company again, it's just too exhausting, it's like the emperor picking concubines, all of it is voodoo. Hope this write-up helps everyone.
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