OpenAI·Software Engineer

OpenAI Software Engineer interview experience

Medium

Positive

Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My technical day had multiple parts mixing coding and system design.

On the coding side, I got several sub-challenges—geography and plant infection problems came up—and I managed to complete three parts. I got close to finishing a fourth but ran out of time during debugging, and the wrap-up felt tense because the last bit required careful iteration.

The system design question was centered on Sora, and the focus was very much on failure modes and edge behavior. I kept having to talk through different cases in detail with the interviewer, not just propose a happy-path architecture. When I think about that day, the system design discussion is what defined it:

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