OpenAI's SWE interview is intense and deliberately open-ended: the company is small, moves fast, and wants engineers who can reason from first principles on problems that don't have clean textbook answers.
About OpenAI
OpenAI hires India-based engineers and researchers, mostly remote or at the Mumbai office, working on model training infrastructure, safety research, and product engineering for ChatGPT and API.
Recruiter screen: role fit, background, timeline (30 min)
Take-home or live pair programming: 1-2 hour coding exercise
Algorithms round: 2 medium-hard DSA problems with trade-off discussion
Systems design round: distributed systems or ML platform design
Past-work deep dive: walkthrough of a project you built end-to-end
Hiring committee review and offer
Recruiter screen (30 min)
Role alignment, compensation range, and logistics. Be ready to discuss why OpenAI specifically.
Pair programming or take-home (60-90 min)
A real-world coding problem; clarity of thought and code structure are evaluated alongside correctness.
Algorithms round (60 min)
Two medium-hard problems. Interviewers follow up with complexity questions and ask you to iterate on your approach.
Systems design round (60 min)
Design a scalable system relevant to the team, such as a rate limiter for the API, a job queue for model inference, or a logging pipeline.
Past-work deep dive (45 min)
Pick your most complex project and expect probing questions on every decision you made: architecture, trade-offs, failures, and lessons.
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