OpenAI Software Engineer Interview Questions

800+ verified questions, indexed by team and level. Real questions submitted by candidates who completed OpenAI loops in the last 24 months.

About the OpenAI Software Engineer hiring loop

OpenAI rounds are heavy on ML system design (training infra, inference at scale, RLHF pipelines) and deep technical depth in your specialty. Behavioural rounds probe research-product collaboration. Bar is unusually high; rejection rate ~98%.

Coding rounds are scored on correctness, clarity, complexity statement, edge-case enumeration, and testability. System design is scored on scale anchoring, API definition quality, data-model trade-offs, and failure-mode reasoning.

Topics covered in OpenAI Software Engineer interviews

  • 01Data structures (arrays, hash maps, trees, graphs)
  • 02Algorithms (DP, greedy, divide & conquer)
  • 03System design (load balancers, caches, databases, queues)
  • 04Operating systems and concurrency
  • 05Database internals and query optimisation
  • 06Distributed systems trade-offs (CAP, consistency, partitioning)

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