OpenAI Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — Plant-Infection Coding Round Plus an In-Depth Management Interview

A friend referred me to a tech + management role that required both domain knowledge and management experience.

It was a 60-minute coding round, and the question was the pretty common plant-infection problem. I wrote up three parts of it and ran out of time, and only touched on the fourth part without really finishing it. The interviewer was very quiet, almost no back-and-forth.

One thing worth flagging about this problem: for the third part, when calculating the countdown to death, the plant that was initially infected would also recover after D days. I didn't think of that at first and spent a bit of time debugging because of it.

They used Coderpad with CMake projects.

Also, I haven't seen many write-ups on the forum for OpenAI management-track interviews, so I hope more people post theirs.

The management round questions were roughly as follows (it seemed like there was a question bank — I could tell the interviewer was looking off-screen to find questions — though I'd guess each interviewer's questions are pretty random):

1. Introduction & Background

• Please introduce yourself and talk about your background.
• Is this the first time you've been in a management role?
• Over your 4 years as a manager, how has your team size changed?

2. Management Philosophy & Operations

• Overall, what's your management philosophy/approach? How do you think about management as a discipline?
• How do you think about 1-on-1 meetings? How do you typically use them?
• As a manager, how do you typically allocate your time? How much time do you spend coding versus managing? How exactly do you structure your schedule to hit that balance?

3. Hiring & Sourcing

• Do you have experience hiring people from outside into your team?
• What did you consider when hiring that person? What were your hiring criteria?
• How did you find that candidate — through an HR recruiting channel, or an internal referral?

4. Mentorship & Career Growth

• Can you share a specific example of helping a junior engineer/new grad grow in their career?
• What did that growth process look like? How long did it take them to get promoted to L4?
• What does the path to L5 look like for them (what's the difference between L4 and L5)?

5. Performance Management

• Have you ever had to restructure a team, or fire/push out an employee?
• How do you handle performance management within the company's culture?
• Can you give a specific example of a team member with a low performance rating? What was the issue (e.g., was it a skill mismatch)? What coaching and support did you give them?

6. Team Dynamics & Composition

• How do you view the team as a whole? How do you assess whether the team's own performance is meeting your standard?
• Have you run into a situation where an individual was performing well, but you still had to change the team's structure (e.g., reassigning work, hiring new people to fill gaps) to hit your goals?
• How did you discover that skill gap existed in the team?

Edit (2026-08-10 07:12 +08:00): Correction — for the third part, it's actually the countdown for recovery and immunity that's being calculated...