Technical Screen

Distributed Node-Counting System Design Question

OpenAISoftware Engineer · Technical Screen · Mar 2026

I've interviewed with OpenAI several times recently. This question gives you a root node and an initial API, sendAsyncMessage(nodeId, message). You need to implement receiveMessage(fromNodeId, message) yourself, and ultimately count how many nodes exist in the whole network. On the surface it looks a bit like DFS, but it's dressed up as a more realistic distributed scenario. Each node can be thou…

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