OpenAI Backend Software Engineer interview questions

Recruiter reach-out, followed by a live coding/systems screen, and a comprehensive 5-round onsite loop. The interviews are highly collaborative but incredibly dense, covering massive-scale data ingestion, high-throughput API layer design, and concrete systems optimization. They want engineers who can navigate deep ambiguity and make rapid, calculated technical trade-offs under high-compute pressures. To prepare for the level of ambiguity in their infrastructure round, I spent two weeks using Apex Interviewer. The AI platform acts like an elite, cynical interviewer that actively pushes back on your architectural assumptions, which forced me to practice defending my database scaling and parallelization choices with extreme precision before the real loop.