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Why OpenAI, Your View on AGI and AI Safety, and Why You Are Leaving Your Role

OpenAISoftware Engineer · Onsite
HardSoftware EngineerOnsiteBehavioral & Leadership

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Behavioral questions asked by both the recruiter and the hiring manager at a frontier AI lab: why you want to join this company specifically, your views on artificial general intelligence and AI safety, and why you are leaving your current role. It tests specificity, considered views on AI risk and a consistent story.

In this company's process, motivation and views on AI come up twice: the recruiter asks about them on the first call, and they are the most common behavioral topic with the hiring manager. Candidates report that a weak answer on the recruiter call alone can end the process. Prepare answers to the questions below.

Clarifying Questions

  • Does the interviewer want a short answer (about two minutes) with room for follow-ups, or a longer narrative?
  • Is it acceptable to express disagreement with parts of the company's public positions?
  • Should examples come mainly from your most recent role?

Part 1 — Why OpenAI

Why do you want to work at OpenAI specifically, rather than at another AI lab or a large technology company?

What This Part Should Cover

  • Specific, accurate reasons grounded in public knowledge of the company's products, research or mission
  • A link to your own experience and to the role you are applying for
  • Why now, and why this company over the alternatives, without disparaging others

Part 2 — Your view on AGI and AI safety

What do you think about artificial general intelligence (AGI)? How do you think about the risks of increasingly capable AI systems, and what should a company building them do about safety?

What This Part Should Cover

  • A considered view on how capable AI may become and on what timescale, with honest uncertainty
  • Concrete risks (misuse, accidents, societal effects) and concrete mitigations
  • How safety should shape the engineering work you would do day to day
  • Willingness to engage with counterarguments

Part 3 — Why are you leaving?

Why are you leaving your current role?

What This Part Should Cover

  • An honest, positive reason framed around growth and fit
  • Consistency with the answers to Parts 1 and 2
  • Brevity

Hints

Hint 1

Tie it to you: The strongest answers connect something specific and public about the company's work to something specific in your own experience and goals.

Hint 2

Hold two ideas at once: Show that you take both the potential benefits and the risks seriously, and be concrete about at least one risk and one thing that reduces it.

Hint 3

Toward, not away: Frame the move around what you want to do next, and keep any criticism of your current employer out of it.

Follow-up questions

  • Which of our recent product or research releases did you find most interesting, and what would you change about it?
  • Describe a time you raised a safety, quality or ethics concern that others did not want to hear.
  • Where do you disagree with the mainstream view on AI risk?
  • What would make you leave this company?