Recruiter screen then moved to a same day coding + architecture rounds. The people were friendly, but I found the questions difficult and hard to complete in the allotted time. The bar is very high these days, and short of perfection and strong internal referrals, the odds of success are low.
No offer
Positive experience
Difficult interview
Application
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2025
Interview
After speaking to a recruiter, the first round is two interviews. Coding is a bit more "practical" than your average LeetCode. And ML Design was discussing approaches to creating a system when there's data, but not in a well organized way. I think they have a very high bar on the coding—I thought I did okay on that and very well on design, but didn't make it to the next round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you manage the technical and non-technical aspects of creating a usable dataset in a particular scenario?
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
1 hour coding interview using coderpad, I used Python language. code had to run and test cases had to pass
1 hour system design interview using excalidraw
Both back to back using Google meet
pick prompt b/w coding, ml coding, and applied statistics. applied statistics presented a compute scenario where knowledge of statistics provides practical insights into addressing the problem in the scenario that was presented
