OpenAI interview questions

Showing 1–30 of 342 results

• 0-to-1 Ownership, Critical Feedback Both Ways, Defining Success, and Why OpenAIMedium

  A software engineer behavioral round covering a 0-to-1 project you built, a time you received negative feedback, how you deliver critical feedback to others, how you define success for a project or product, and why you want to join OpenAI. It tests ownership, self-awareness, communication and motivation.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• A Project You Decided Not to ShipHard

  This question evaluates your product judgment, objective decision-making, and ability to prioritize organizational resources over personal or team output.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• AI Safety Views and Leadership-Principle Behavioral QuestionsMedium

  A hiring-manager round asks for your view of AI safety and how it would shape your engineering work, followed by standard behavioral questions in the style of Amazon's leadership principles. It tests genuine motivation, judgment when safety and speed conflict, and structured, evidence-based storytelling.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• Add Consecutive-Value Bonuses to Grid PathsMedium

  Tests dynamic programming on a 2D grid with extended state tracking to incorporate multi-step path history for score bonuses, path counting, and lexicographical path reconstruction.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Aggregate Recent Message Events And Active ChatsHard

  Design an in-memory aggregation system that tracks rolling window message counts and distinct active entities across chats with bounded memory and O(1) amortized operations.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Analyze A/B Test Results for Subscription Conversion RatesMedium

  Evaluates A/B test analysis for a limited-time free trial offer. Strong answers compute paid-conversion lift, account for trial starts and churn, test statistical significance, and make a launch decision using retained paid value, revenue, guardrails, and long-term holdouts.

  OpenAIData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationOnline Assessment
• Analyze matrix multiplication complexityHard

  This question evaluates understanding of time and space complexity for matrix multiplication and memory accounting in ML workloads, testing competency in asymptotic analysis, linear algebra operations, and resource estimation.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Assess free-month promotion impactHard

  This question tests your ability to design a rigorous experimentation framework to measure the causal impact of a promotional offer while accounting for self-selection bias and long-term churn behavior.

  OpenAIData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationTechnical Screen
• At-Least-Once Job Queue with Timeouts, Retries, a Dead-Letter Queue and DependenciesMedium

  Implement an in-memory job queue with enqueue, reserve, pass, fail and a dead-letter queue, where reservations that outlive their timeout are redelivered for at-least-once delivery, then extend enqueue with job dependencies. It tests state-machine design, timeout tracking, retry accounting and dependency handling.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Behavioral: why OpenAI, AI safety views, 0-to-1 work, feedback, defining successMedium

  Behavioral questions reported from OpenAI's software engineering loop: why OpenAI, how you think about AGI and AI safety, a 0-to-1 project, negative feedback you received, and how you defined success for a project. A slide-based project deep dive then probes technical depth under repeated challenge, testing ownership, calibrated judgment and composure.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• Build a Compose Rating CardMedium

  Tests proficiency in modern Android development with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, focusing on unidirectional data flow (UDF), custom stateless composables, ViewModel state management, and asynchronous submission handling.

  OpenAIAndroid EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Build a Reliable Streaming Chat UIHard

  This question evaluates understanding of real-time front-end architecture and state management in React, focusing on transient streaming state, concurrency control, UI consistency during tokenized updates, and the appropriate use of hooks such as useRef versus useState in the Software Engineering Fundamentals domain.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsHR Screen
• Build a SaaS API-Credit Ledger With Expiring Grants and Late EventsMedium

  Implement an API-credit ledger that grants, spends, and reports balances, where each grant expires and spending always draws from the soonest-expiring usable grant first, even when operations arrive out of timestamp order.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Build a Streaming Chat InputMedium

  This question evaluates frontend engineering skills including streaming data handling, incremental token-by-token rendering, asynchronous state management, and preserving UI responsiveness during long-running API streams.

  OpenAIFrontend EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Build and troubleshoot image classification and backpropHard

  Build and troubleshoot image classification and backprop evaluates core ML concepts, assumptions, math intuition, training/evaluation trade-offs, and practical failure modes in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerMachine LearningTechnical Screen
• Cheapest Daily Shirt Colors With No Color Repeated on Consecutive DaysHard

  Pick a blue, green or red shirt for each of n days so that the total price is as low as possible while never buying the same color on two consecutive days, and return the chosen color sequence. It tests dynamic programming over a small state space and reconstruction of the optimal choices.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Cheapest Paint-Booth Color Schedule With No Repeat on Consecutive CarsHard

  Choose one of three paint colors for each car on an assembly line to minimize total cost, never repeating a color on consecutive cars, and return the exact color chosen for each car.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Clarify a Machine Topology Coding TaskMedium

  Implement and formalize an API to analyze distributed accelerator interconnect topologies, separating summary metrics from component-level graph structures and validating topologies like rings, cliques, and lines.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Clarify and Design Social-Graph MilestonesMedium

  Clarify ambiguous social-graph milestones before designing follow and unfollow operations, consistent snapshots, and user recommendations. The discussion tests directed-edge semantics, snapshot guarantees, recommendation-policy choices, exclusions, deterministic tie rules, scale assumptions, and contract-focused testing.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Compute Infection Time in a GridHard

  This problem tests your ability to model state propagation in a 2D grid using Breadth-First Search (BFS) to determine the time required for a dynamic condition to cover all reachable nodes.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Compute Matrix Prefix Products And GradientsHard

  This question evaluates understanding of automatic differentiation for matrix operations, specifically forward and reverse-mode gradients for sequential, associative (but noncommutative) matrix products, together with algorithmic analysis of time and space complexity.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerMachine LearningOnsite
• Compute Plant Infection StabilizationMedium

  This problem tests your ability to simulate state propagation across a grid over discrete time steps and determine the minimum number of interventions required to contain an infection.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Compute Plant Infection TimeMedium

  This problem tests your ability to model a grid-based propagation process using Breadth-First Search (BFS), specifically handling multi-source initialization and obstacle avoidance.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Compute churn with re-subscriptionsHard

  This problem tests your ability to reconstruct user subscription states over time from raw event logs, specifically identifying active status to calculate monthly churn rates.

  OpenAIData ScientistData Manipulation (SQL/Python)Technical Screen
• Compute entropy and implement 1-NNMedium

  This question evaluates numerical stability and streaming computation for entropy estimation from logits, along with efficient vectorized linear-algebra implementation of 1-nearest-neighbor inference and its interpretation as a neural-network forward pass under different distance metrics.

  OpenAIMachine Learning EngineerMachine LearningOnsite
• Compute infection spread timeMedium

  This problem tests your ability to model a spreading process on a 2D grid using a multi-source Breadth-First Search (BFS) to determine the time required for a state to propagate across the entire space.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Compute signup rate and retention from raw logsEasy

  This question evaluates the ability to manipulate event-level logs to compute cohort metrics—specifically signup rate and D30 retention—testing proficiency in SQL/Python, event-time windowing, joins, aggregation, and understanding of upstream logging semantics.

  OpenAIData ScientistData Manipulation (SQL/Python)Technical Screen
• Contiguous Extent Allocator for a Storage Volume, Then O(log n)Hard

  Build an allocator that hands out contiguous runs of blocks on a fixed-size volume and takes them back with coalescing, first with a simple sorted list and then with logarithmic reserve and release. Tests splitting/merging logic, choosing indexes for size and neighbor lookups, and keeping them consistent.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Convert IPv4 Ranges to CIDR BlocksMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of IPv4 addressing, binary/bitwise manipulation, and the ability to summarize consecutive address ranges into minimal CIDR blocks, and belongs to the Coding & Algorithms domain for backend engineering roles.

  OpenAIBackend EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Count Connected Friend GroupsMedium

  Determine the number of connected components in an undirected graph represented as an adjacency matrix using graph traversal or disjoint set union.

  OpenAISoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen