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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OpenAIResearch Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Back-to-Back Screens, No Break, Rejected

Sharing a recent phone screen with OpenAI for an RE (security track) role. I got rejected — hope this helps people getting ready for one of these. Interview format Two rounds, 60 minutes each, back to back, with no break in between. There was no round-specific prompt, just the generic Technical Interview Preparation PDF the recruiter sends out, which I'm assuming everyone gets the same version of…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAIFull-Stack Software Engineer
Aug 2026

Ship a Working App, Not Just LeetCode

Before I get into it: this is a writeup of my full process interviewing for a Full-Stack role at OpenAI, along with my impressions, as a reference for people prepping. OpenAI's interviews are pretty different from traditional big-tech interviews (especially the pure-LeetCode-grinding kind) — it leans a lot more toward "real engineering + product sense + mission fit," so if you only prepped LeetCo…

OfferOnsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Rejected After the Infrastructure Onsite Round

Phone Screen: Coding — Snapshot Set Implement a Set that supports snapshots. Besides the normal add/remove operations, you need to support creating a snapshot and being able to read the state of the set at a given snapshot moment. Onsite 1: System Design — Design a Payment System Design a payment system where a transaction first goes through an external payment service for approval/denial. Once a…

RejectedOnsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Recruiter Rescheduled a Month, Rejected After One BQ Call

The experience was pretty bad. The recruiter kept rescheduling. I applied in early July and was supposed to get a phone screen about a week later, but she had stuff come up plus vacation, so it didn't actually happen until early August. Then during the call she didn't turn her camera on, and the questions were all behavioral-type stuff — things like how do you manage people, what's a technically…

RejectedHR Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Payment Holds, Charges, and Batch Processing

The question was to design a payment processor. The basic flow was that a merchant first sends a hold request, which we forward to the upstream payment network, then receive an approval or rejection. After a successful hold, there is a separate charge request later. Charges are then grouped by payment network into batch files and sent on a schedule. I'd prepared for payment-system questions befor…

Technical Screen0
OpenAISoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

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 f…

Technical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

ChatGPT System Design, Vector Store and a Scheduler Debugging Round, Rejected

SWE VO System design: design ChatGPT. At first the interviewer said not to worry about scale and no need to persist anything. Later they asked why use SSE instead of WebSocket, and also asked how to optimize the frontend so that long conversations can still render well. Coding: all new questions I had never seen. I used Python. Vector Store The problem is to implement a simplified vector store th…

RejectedOnsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

75-Minute Malloc Screen, CoderPad Crashed, Advanced Anyway

There's not much to say about the question itself — it's just malloc. But the interview process wasn't quite what I imagined, so I'm sharing it for everyone's reference. The interviewer's background looked very, very strong. After reading the question, I went with the standard interview-report format and started with first-fit. The interviewer pressed for a ton of detail — what data structure to…

In progressTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Phone, Virtual Onsite, and a Silent Extra Round

Sharing my recent interview experience, hopefully it helps folks interviewing later avoid the same landmine. Phone Screen: Coding: Design a social media feed, Part 1 and Part 2. I didn't fully finish it, but I talked through my remaining approach. System Design: Sora. The interviewer pressed on some details, including why I chose AWS SQS and how to handle various failure cases. Virtual Onsite: BQ…

RejectedOnsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Rejected After the Recruiter Call, Before Any Technical Round

I was pretty surprised. I never expected to fail at this round. A friend referred me. The role is not in the AI area, and it matches my current job by more than 80%. When I scheduled the call with the recruiter, I asked if there was anything I needed to prepare. The recruiter said no preparation was needed, so I assumed it would be a very casual chat to get to know my basic info. These are the qu…

RejectedHR Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Down-to-the-Wire Coding Round and “Design ChatGPT”

These were all questions I'd already seen before, and I still feel like I did so poorly — why can't I even execute cleanly on questions I already know... The coding round was GPU Credits II. I asked the interviewer a few clarifying questions, but he kept telling me to just go look for the answer myself in the test cases. I explained a brute-force approach, and the interviewer said he didn't fully…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two Onsite Rounds, Same Day, Coding and System Design

I had two rounds back to back on the same day, each about 60 minutes. The interviewer was about 5 minutes late both times. The coding round interviewer was really nice, but the second round felt a lot more serious. Overall the experience was fine. I got the rejection letter the next day. The coding round was a multipart social graph + snapshot problem. The first question was the same as H2H. The…

RejectedOnsite0
OpenAISoftware EngineerSenior+
Jul 2026

Recruiter Screen With Zero Technical Questions

Got pulled in by a recruiter on LinkedIn, scheduled a 30-minute recruiter call. Writing this down right after while it's still fresh. Bottom line: it was pretty light, zero technical questions. Basically I gave my self-intro, and then she asked one question per experience on my resume without digging deep — felt like she was just confirming what's on the resume is real. Then she asked why I want…

In progressHR Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Extra System Design Round, Then a Template Rejection

Coding: It was the same as what's in the other interview write-ups, the chatbot that needs a refactor. The only difference was that for every person who is away, whenever someone @s them, the bot just directly replies with the away status. SD: CloudIDE. Maybe the interviewer wasn't very clear on what they wanted either, so I gave them an SSH version, where one person or several people can share a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAIiOS EngineerSenior+
Jul 2026

Rejected After a Flawless Technical Screen

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RejectedTechnical ScreenPremium0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

OpenAI Software Engineer interview: two days of coding interviews

The process was straightforward and fast-paced. I had two days of back-to-back interviews, mostly coding problems, plus a hiring-manager interview. It felt practical, more about showing I could solve problems than getting lost in theory. The topics matched standard preparation: LeetCode-style practice covered the coding well, and I also prepared for the behavioral round. The turnaround after the…

0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

OpenAI Software Engineer interview: machine counting and rate-limit design

I started with a phone screen about my background and a basic data structures problem. From there, the interviews ramped up quickly. The process felt intense and focused on whether I could handle real engineering problem solving under pressure. The technical rounds included a complex challenge around counting machines and a system design question about rate limiting. I had already practiced rate-…

Offer0
OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer
Jun 2026

Two Brand-New Coding Rounds, Now Waiting on the Onsite

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

Rejected After a Two-Part Rebalance Shards Coding Round

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RejectedOnsitePremium0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

Four Rounds, Rejected After a Rough Payment-System Design Round

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RejectedOnsitePremium0

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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