I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2025
Interview
Cold e-mail from recruiter; ignored it for several months but then reached back out. They reassigned a new recruiter and went from there. Process start to finish was about 3 weeks, in the following order:
Initial recruiting screen (vibe check)
Initial Hiring manager screen (vibe check)
Initial Coding screen (difficulty 3/5)
Coding screen 1 (difficulty 3/5)
Distributed systems design screen (difficulty 4/5)
Hiring manager screen 2 (extended vibe check)
Coding screen 2 (difficulty 5/5)
Reference check
Offer
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It was slightly more specific than this, but approximately: Design a fault tolerant, polite web crawling service that can scale to 10M requests per second.
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.
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