OpenAI

OpenAI Software Engineer Interview Questions

170+ questions from real OpenAI Software Engineer interviews, reported by candidates.

170
Questions
6
Round Types
8
Topic Areas
2025-2026
Year Range

Round Types

Coding 98 Phone 16 System Design 6 Phone Screen 6 Onsite 6 OA 4

Top Topics

Questions

Anyone here interviewed for the OpenAI Senior Support Engineer role? Looking for insights 🙏 Trying to understand what to expect, particularly around: * The **vibe coding round** * **Troubleshooting /

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I have a Flask web app for small business owners to automate certain processes. I've integrated an LLM chat via calls to OpenAI using their agents SDK. The agent loop just runs in my web app currently

Have an onsite interview coming up with OpenAI for early career. Does anyone have any tips? Does anyone know what to expect for the behavioural round specifically?

2024 vs 2025 vs 2026

Recruiter 2026

**2024** *(applied from Jan 2024 - May 2024)* \- Basically my first time applying to stuff. Before this I didn't even realize you had to apply online and that handing out my resume at my university ca

Hey everyone, I was fortunate enough to be an intern at OpenAI last summer. I worked on developer tooling and the GPT 5 launch - it was a very fun and rewarding time! Happy to answer any questions abo

Although I failed, I still wanted to give feedback. The main reason I failed was because I wasn't thinking clearly enough. I had two phone interviews, one on Software Development (SD) and one on codin

Just finished my interview, so I'm reminiscing. System design: multi-tenant CI/CD. The question description was the same as one I saw in a previous interview: Design a multi-tenant CI/CD system which

This post was last edited by Anonymous on 2025-09-25 08:49. General SDE: Has anyone encountered this prompt before? This will be a coding interview, and the task will be a smaller-scale version of wha

These past few days waiting for the results have been agonizing, so I'm sharing my interview experience to vent. I saw someone share that they received an offer first thing Saturday morning; does this

Store Interview SD: CI/CD from the forum, mainly focusing on how to achieve exactly-once execution under the premise of Fault Tolerant and Scalability. Coding: Machine Tree to count and topology, orig

I crammed for two or three days preparing for the interview, but none of the questions were on the topic, haha. The coding question was an OOD (Object-Oriented Learning) exercise: design a logic for a

I've been preparing for open AI interviews recently and have summarized most of the frequently asked questions I've seen. Generally speaking, it is very fragmented, so I summarize it to save everyone

I've been preparing for open AI interviews recently and have summarized most of the frequently asked questions I've seen. Generally speaking, it is very fragmented, so I summarize it to save everyone

The Challenge You have an old codebase for a chat service. It supports different bots (AwayBot, MeetBot, TacoBot) that react to specific commands. Right now, all the code is mixed together in one b

The Challenge Design a CI/CD system that is scalable and can handle crashes. This system serves many different customers (multi-tenant). It must run workflows defined by users whenever they push co

Problem Overview You are building a tool to find the first version of a software library that has a specific feature. This problem tests how well you can parse text, use **Binary Search**, and hand

Problem Requirements Design a simple payment processor architecture. This system handles payment requests. It sends them to outside processors (like a bank) and returns the result. The process has

Problem Statement You need to write a Python class that acts as an IPv4 iterator. This class will let you loop through IP addresses one by one. The interview problem adds difficulty in steps: first

Problem Statement You need to build a system that manages a block of computer memory. Your tool should work like `malloc()` and `free()` in C. It handles asking for memory (allocation) and giving i

What OpenAI Looks for in Software Engineer Interviews

OpenAI Software Engineer interviews are calibrated against the level and scope expected of the role. Across 170+ verified candidate reports on LeakCode, the consistent signals interviewers look for: clear problem decomposition before coding, explicit complexity reasoning, structured handling of edge cases, and the ability to articulate trade-offs between two reasonable approaches.

The discriminator between candidates who advance and candidates who do not is rarely the final correctness of the solution. It is the path to the solution: did you ask clarifying questions, did you state your approach before coding, did you handle edge cases without prompting, and did you communicate your reasoning throughout. Reports tagged "no hire" frequently cite a working solution with poor communication; reports tagged "strong hire" cite clear thinking even when the final solution was incomplete.

How To Use This Question Set

Real interview reports are a calibration tool, not a memorization target. Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months; memorizing exact problems risks misleading you when the interviewer uses a variant. The high-leverage use: identify the patterns that appear repeatedly in OpenAI Software Engineer reports, practice those patterns on similar (not identical) problems, and use the reports to understand the interviewer's typical follow-up depth.

Filter the questions below by round type, difficulty, and recency. Focus first on reports from the past 6-12 months; older reports may reference questions that have since rotated out of OpenAI's pool. Reports tagged with quantified difficulty (e.g., "medium-hard") are higher-signal than reports without difficulty tags.

Round-by-Round Expectations

OpenAI Software Engineer loops typically span 4-6 rounds across phone screens and on-site or virtual on-site interviews. The structure varies by company: some run 1 recruiter screen + 1 technical phone + 3-4 on-site rounds; others run 1 recruiter screen + 1 OA + 4-5 on-site rounds. The recruiter screen is logistics and culture-light; the technical phone screen is medium-difficulty coding; the on-site loop covers coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral rounds.

Each round is designed to surface a specific signal. Coding rounds: correctness, code quality, complexity reasoning, communication. System design rounds: requirements clarification, design judgment, operational thinking. Behavioral rounds: ownership scope, leadership, ambiguity tolerance, conflict navigation. Strong candidates explicitly hit each signal dimension out loud during the round; weak candidates focus only on solving the prompt.

Common Interview Mistakes At This Combination

Reports tagged "no hire" at OpenAI Software Engineer commonly cite: jumping into code without clarifying requirements, coding silently for 10+ minutes without verbalizing approach, missing edge cases (empty input, single element, very large input, overflow), and producing a working solution that the candidate cannot explain or refactor when probed. Strong candidates avoid these patterns by following a consistent template: clarify, verbalize approach, code with narration, test with examples.

Behavioral and design rounds have their own failure modes. Behavioral: stories that use "we" instead of "I" diluting individual signal, stories with no quantified outcome, defensiveness when probed about failure. Design: not asking clarifying questions, not stating requirements out loud, designing for a single server when the prompt clearly implies scale, ignoring operational concerns (deployment, monitoring, rollback). These show up in roughly half of OpenAI Software Engineer interview retrospectives on LeakCode.

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