OpenAI Software Engineer Interview Experience — Virtual Onsite Design Round: Sora With One GPU per Task

OpenAI·Software Engineer·Sep 2026
OnsiteIn progressmedium

Same as the coding round, the interviewer pulled out the question from my phone screen.

But the interviewer was really friendly, and he also told me an important piece of information:

right now the company has interviewers pick the power grid question as their first choice, so everyone should prepare that one more.

Later it switched to designing Sora, and a pretty useful constraint was that each task can only use one GPU, which simplified a lot of the scheduling problems.

We talked in detail about how to do fair queueing, went through several approaches and analyzed the pros and cons, and then talked about how to do cancellation, again going over the pros and cons of different approaches. The interviewer's take was that you can just make an RPC/HTTP call to the GPU to cancel, because each task uses at most one GPU and the volume of cancellations isn't large. I said that works, but it's not very extensible.

At the end we chatted a bit about what his team works on and his working hours. He said it's 12 hours a day minimum, and he kind of misses the big-tech days. It's rare to run into an interviewer this honest. Hoping he goes easy on me.

Wishing everyone the best.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
OpenAI
Role
Software Engineer
Rounds
Onsite
Outcome
In progress
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Sep 2026
Questions from this interview
1 question

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