Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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74 stories

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OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Fault-Tolerant Queue Coding and Online Devbox Design Phone Screens

I interviewed last week. After work I prepared on and off for over a month, and I went through basically all the questions on the forum. The phone screen was two rounds, one coding and one design. The coding question was a fault tolerant queue. I had to implement enqueue, reserve, fail and a DLQ, and they gave unit tests that all had to pass. The first part went fairly smoothly and all the tests…

In progressTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

System Design for a Real-Time Trivia Battle Royale Platform

Sharing the system design question from one round of my OpenAI technical interview. The question was given on the spot, and the design below is my solution. Happy to discuss. Question Design a real-time trivia battle royale platform: dozens to a hundred or so players join a room, questions are released round by round, and each round eliminates the players who answer wrong and the slowest player.…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Three-Part Sliding Window Coding Round

A few days ago I had a technical interview at OpenAI. The coding round had this multi-part problem, so I'm sharing the problem statement and my solution. Part 1: Recent Interaction Count Implement an in-memory, single-threaded chat session analytics service. The input is a live interaction log stream whose global ts is non-decreasing. Each log entry has: user: str, chat: int (unique within each u…

Onsite1
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Phone Screen Failed on a Fault Tolerant Queue and a Typing Race Design

I had two phone screen rounds, one coding and one design. The coding round was a fault tolerant queue. I had to implement enqueue, reserve, fail, and a DLQ, and there were 7 unit tests that all had to pass. Part 2 added task dependencies. Each task comes with a cooldown after it gets preempted, and you have to use the preempt timestamp to work out yourself when the cooldown ends. Also, when a tas…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Failed the Phone Screen on a Malloc Implementation

A recruiter reached out to me. I think my background was a good fit, because they only screened me a little before scheduling the phone interview. I got one question, malloc, with some tests provided. Part 1 was malloc/free. I wrote it by hand, using a list to simulate a linked list, and I couldn't get it to pass in one go. I debugged for a while, then the interviewer gave me a hint, I rewrote a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Fault-Tolerant Work Queue Coding Plus a Metrics Monitoring Design Round

Coding Fault-Tolerant Work Queue I solved the first part but got stuck on one silly bug which took a long time, but I got it to green eventually. I coded up the second part quickly but couldn't run the code due to time. The interviewer said it should be okay, that I was very close, and that I am good. System Design Metrics monitoring variation I did okay in this round. The interviewer didn't seem…

In progressTechnical Screen0
OpenAIData Scientist
Sep 2026

Free-Trial Take-home and Four Final Interview Rounds

Take-home assignment + live review take home assignment related to free trial Explore the data, identify key insights, and make recommendations. Deliver a polished and concise slide deck. This is followed by a 1-hour live interview: 20–25 minutes: take home discussion 20–25 minutes: hands on sql 10 minutes: python debug Hiring Manager Interview 1 hour project deep dive with the hiring manager Ons…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Virtual Onsite Rescheduled a Dozen Times, GPU Credit Coding Round

First, let me vent about how chaotic this company is. It was originally scheduled as 4 rounds in one day. Then it got rescheduled a dozen-plus times and ended up as 4 days with 1 round each. The interviewer also got swapped 7-8 times... On top of that, the interviewer didn't know what I'd been asked in the phone screen, so the question they gave me was the same one as my phone screen, and then th…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Strong Coding, Closed Out as a Borderline Case After the Virtual Onsite

Overall, I just did my best (shrug). Phone screen: Coding — "infection," 3/5. I got stuck on a bug on the third question and spent about 15 minutes debugging it. System design: chess. Interviewed on a Thursday, heard back that I passed by the following Monday. Virtual Onsite: Coding — IP address, 3.5/5. I got to the IPv6 part of the question and was hunched over looking up how to write a BigInteg…

RejectedOnsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Virtual Onsite Design Round: Sora With One GPU per Task

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…

In progressOnsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Positive Feedback, Rejected for a Better Background Match

Interview experience for an OpenAI team-specific hire. Just giving a little back to the forum. Phone screen: Coding: GPU Credit 2 System Design: Payment System About a week after the phone screen I had an HM chat, and after that I moved on to the onsite. Onsite: Coding: Plant Infection System Design: Design Steam Deep Dive HM Chat (with a neighboring team) The Deep Dive and the HM Chat were both…

RejectedOnsite0
OpenAIResearch Scientist
Sep 2026

New Card Game Coding Round That Tests Extensible OOD Design

The role was RS. I got a new coding problem, a card game. The first three parts were: first, implement a comparison where three of a kind > pair > high card; second, add a new hand so the order becomes three of a kind > flush > pair > high card; third, a discard rule (the rule I got is not quite the same as the one people posted on the forum, mine was to discard if it is not a pair). You can use…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Devbox System Design Phone Screen, Built the Wrong Thing

I was asked the devbox design question and I failed to recognize it as such, since I didn't practice it much, nor was it among the hot questions on the forum. I ended up creating a generic container orchestration platform. Another interview-prep site I looked at does mark it as a MUST, so it would be useful for other candidates to peek at other question lists too. The interview experience was ove…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

Transformer Bug Hunt with KV Cache from Scratch and a Five-Part Plant Infection Problem

Hi, I am preparing for OpenAI's ML coding interview and have summarized the ML coding questions mentioned in the OpenAI/Anthropic interview rounds I have given so far. Anthropic Research Fundamentals Round: It was related to implementing an ML algo and discussing various research/mathematical aspects around it. OpenAI ML Coding (Transformer Debugging): Debugging 4-5 implanted bugs in the transfor…

Technical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Onsite with Grid Design and an Infection Coding Round

I finished my onsite last week, so I'm sharing my experience before the result comes out. Design: grid. I hadn't looked at any interview reports and was totally clueless. The interviewer was really nice and kept guiding me, and in the end I managed to come up with some stuff, but it's probably not looking good. Project: I talked about a fairly big product that I recently led the launch of. The sc…

In progressOnsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

An Unfamiliar IoT Log-Platform Design Question

Coding: KV store. System design: This seemed to be a new question. I don't think I'd seen it in interview reports. Design an IoT log platform: Large numbers of devices continuously collect logs both online and offline, and upload them in batches when online. The platform can also send requests to devices asking them to record particular types of logs. The platform needs to receive and store logs…

RejectedTechnical Screen1
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Brand-New Rectangle Coding Question and a Grid System Design

I just finished my OpenAI interview and wanted to share today's experience. Unfortunately, the coding round gave me a brand new question I had never seen before. The topic was Rectangle. Roughly, you maintain a 2D board, and requirements get added step by step: add rectangle remove rectangle undo after that there were follow-ups like removeAt / batch remove The whole thing was multipart, adding o…

Technical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Delayed Feedback in a Binary Search Problem

This was my OpenAI rejection experience. Both the coding and system design questions may have been new, because I had never seen either one before. The coding problem had two parts, and both seemed related to binary search. In the first part, I had to implement binary search to guess a secret number. There was a function that reported whether my guess was too low or too high, but its response was…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAI
Aug 2026

Nailed the Memorized Coding Question, Lost the System Design Round

I applied to OpenAI myself back in June. As the interview got closer, I saw on the forum that the interview reports all seemed to be about the same handful of questions, so I decided to prepare those thoroughly and really understand them before going in. I ended up rescheduling three times, and the recruiter got angry — said I'd rescheduled three times already, which meant the timing wasn't right…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

GPU Credits and a Photo Storage System

This was my OpenAI software engineer technical screen, adding a recent data point. The coding problem was GPU Credit. I had seen a similar question before, so I finished it almost immediately. The task was roughly to implement a GPU-credit or resource-credit system that supported: Granting a quantity of credits with activation and expiration times. Subtracting or consuming credits at a particular…

RejectedTechnical Screen0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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