Why OpenAI, views on AI safety, and coordinating large cross-team projects

A behavioral round for a staff-level software engineering role at OpenAI covered three topics: why the candidate wants to join OpenAI, how they think about AI safety, and how they coordinate large projects across teams. Answer each as you would in the interview. ### Clarifying Questions - For the cross-team project, does the interviewer want one project explored in depth, or several shorter examples? - Should the AI safety answer focus on the field's open problems, or on how safety shows up in day-to-day engineering decisions? ### Part 1 — Why OpenAI? Why do you want to work at OpenAI, and why now? ```hint Specific to you and to the work Connect something concrete in your own experience to specific work this company does, rather than to its general reputation or the excitement around AI. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - A motivation grounded in the candidate's own history and in specific work at the company - What the candidate would bring at a staff level, not only what they hope to gain - Awareness of what working there demands and why that suits them ### Part 2 — AI safety How do you think about AI safety, and how would it shape the way you work as an engineer here? ```hint From opinion to practice Hold a clear position, then connect it to engineering decisions you would make: what you would build, test, monitor, or decline to ship. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - A considered view that distinguishes kinds of risk rather than a slogan - Concrete engineering practices through which safety shows up in the candidate's work - How the candidate acts when safety conflicts with speed or other goals ### Part 3 — Coordinating large projects across teams Tell me about a large project you coordinated across several teams. How did you align them, and what did you do when their priorities conflicted? ```hint Show the mechanisms Pick one project where you owned the outcome without managing the people, and be ready to name the mechanisms you used: plans, interfaces, reviews, escalation. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - The scope and stakes, and the candidate's specific role among the teams - The mechanisms used to align teams, track dependencies and make decisions - A real conflict or setback, how it was resolved, the measurable outcome, and what the candidate learned ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Specific, first-person examples with the candidate's own decisions and their consequences - Staff-level scope: influence across teams, judgment about trade-offs, and raising the bar for others - Consistency across the three answers: the motivation, the safety stance and the leadership style fit together - Honesty about mistakes and what changed afterwards ### Follow-up Questions - Tell me about a time a partner team missed a commitment your project depended on. What did you do? - Describe a time you pushed back on shipping something because of a safety, security or reliability concern. What happened? - What is a view about AI risk that you have changed your mind about, and what changed it? - If you joined, how would you spend your first months to earn influence across teams?