OpenAI Software Engineer interview experience

They emphasized a Learning Sample—essentially a take-home style project—that I had to complete and then defend later in a deep-dive session.

In that deep review, the focus felt very practical: they wanted to understand how I handled real-world bottlenecks, concurrency, and large-scale data ingestion. The bar was clearly about engineering judgment, not just knowing algorithms on paper.

I didn’t end up getting an offer. The experience still gave me a strong sense of what they valued, because the conversation around my project made it obvious they were evaluating how I think when constraints