OpenAI·Software Engineer

OpenAI Software Engineer interview experience

Medium

Neutral

Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

The first thing I did was a coding round that focused on a GPU Credit problem—something that had a known shape from the community, but still required real problem-solving as requirements came with follow-ups.

I remember spending extra time on the follow-up questions, and the system design round then pushed me into designing a job scheduler they referred to as Sora, framed like a wrapper around scheduling.

The most intense part was how deep the interviewer went on failure handling and operational behavior. We talked through what happens when the GPU pool is short and workers queue, whether workers should resume from checkpoints or restart after termination, how checkpointing should be designed, and how to avoid burning compute when jobs fail halfway. It was the kind of discussion where the

Create a free Dataford account to unlock the full round-by-round breakdown, the questions asked and the outcome.

Read the full report Read the full report

Preparing for this interview?

OpenAI Software Engineer interview guideThe full process, round by round, with the question bank Practice Software Engineer interview questionsReal questions from this role across companies All OpenAI interview guidesEvery role we cover at this company