Why do you want to work at OpenAI?

"It was very rigorous but the recruiter was actually accurate and helpful about what to prepare, which is rare and I really appreciated that. The process consisted of a system design interview and a coding interview. The system design round focused on designing a payment processing system. The interviewer pushed beyond a basic design and spent a lot of time exploring failure modes, retries, idempotency, operational concerns, and correctness under real-world conditions. It felt closer to designing something that could actually run in production than many system design interviews I've done elsewhere. The coding round was also fairly challenging. The problem itself wasn't especially difficult from an algorithmic perspective, but it required careful handling of edge cases and a precise understanding of the requirements. I felt like there was less emphasis on LeetCode-style tricks and more emphasis on building a correct, production-quality solution. What went well was that the interviewers were engaged and clearly knowledgeable. The conversations felt collaborative rather than adversarial. What didn't go well, at least for me, was that I underestimated how much depth they expected around correctness and edge cases. In hindsight, I would have spent more time validating assumptions and thinking through failure scenarios before diving into implementation."

"I applied for a new grad software engineer role, did the OA, and then got nudged forward by a recruiter after I let my original link expire. Because I was slow to schedule, the interview slots were really backed up, so my live rounds did not happen until January. The process itself was pretty short once it started: one easy live coding round, then a final that was a coding interview plus a behavioral across two consecutive days. Everything was virtual and honestly a lot less intimidating than the in-person finance interviews I had done before. I got the offer in February, but I already had another offer lined up, so I stopped at team matching and never actually met a hiring manager."

"I got sourced by a contractor first and then handed off to an actual OpenAI recruiter, which was a little unusual but pretty smooth. The process was a recruiter screen, then a first technical screen with one system design and one coding round, then a virtual onsite with only two more technicals plus behavioral, cross-functional behavioral, and a project deep dive. What stood out most was that the coding wasn't really LeetCode-shaped even though that was the prep guidance I got. The whole loop felt much more practical and scale-heavy than expected, and the project deep dive was easily the most probing part because they kept asking what I actually did and why. My main takeaway was that they want strong generalist problem solvers more than people who just memorize interview patterns."

"I got sourced by a contractor first and then handed off to an actual OpenAI recruiter, which was a little unusual but pretty smooth. The process was a recruiter screen, then a first technical screen with one system design and one coding round, then a virtual onsite with only two more technicals plus behavioral, cross-functional behavioral, and a project deep dive. What stood out most was that the coding wasn't really LeetCode-shaped even though that was the prep guidance I got. The whole loop felt much more practical and scale-heavy than expected, and the project deep dive was easily the most probing part because they kept asking what I actually did and why. My main takeaway was that they want strong generalist problem solvers more than people who just memorize interview patterns."

"I got in through a referral, then did a recruiter screen, two 60 min technical screens, and three more technical interviews after that. I got rejected after those technical rounds, so I never made it to the hiring manager chat and maybe a team presentation, which sounded like the next steps. The whole process felt a lot less gameable than a normal big-tech loop. The first screen was more of a real algorithm problem, the second was about writing correct code fast, and the later rounds were practical ML/debugging plus one really hard stats-heavy round. The ML stats round was the one that hit hardest because it felt like graduate-level information theory, and across the process I got fewer hints than I'm used to."

"A recruiter reached out to me cold by email, and the process itself matched what they told me almost exactly. I had a quick recruiter screen, then a long phone screen that was really two interviews back to back: a Playground design prompt and a coding problem around credits. After that I did a virtual onsite that was only three rounds, about four hours total, with a refactoring exercise, a past-project presentation with slides, and a leadership conversation. I ended up getting rejected, and the clearest signal I got afterward was that scale mattered a lot, especially in the project presentation round. One weird process detail is that a different recruiter reached back out to me again a few months later, so my impression was their internal tracking and cooldown handling were not especially tight at that point."

"This was one of the hardest loops I had completed. The hiring manager screen and behavioral interviews were standard. The system design interview for a TPM was challenging. The expectations for a TPM included a great deal of technical depth."