In progressTechnical Screen

Four One-Hour Rounds in a Single Phone Screen

OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026

Sharing my recent OpenAI Research phone screen. Round 1: general coding, 1hr Debug a distributed system. They gave me a buggy job scheduler written in Python — I had to check for data races, deadlocks, lock contention, and whether the rate limiter was implemented correctly. Partway through I had to write my own test cases to confirm the scheduler actually worked, then calculate how long the sched…

Shared by a candidate · reported Apr 2026. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.