Set up with phone screen
System design + practical coding. I was told by the OpenAI recruiter that I would know what style of practical coding to expect (debugging, frontend vs backend), but this did not happen.
Biggest gripe about particularly the practical coding question: the interviewer sat in *silence* for minutes at a time. I would try to confirm assumptions, and would get back a non-answer or a confusing flip-flopping set of answers.
There were at least 2 parts, but I assume there were more
This whole process dragged on for about a month, much longer than I anticipated. It kicked off with a technical phone screen, where I was asked about data structures and algorithms. The DSA questions were tough, especially one regarding matrix traversal. Mid-way through the coding round, it clicked that I had tackled this exact problem on PracHub just days before, which helped me structure my answer. The onsite included system design questions that were challenging, but I didn’t end up receiving an offer. Overall, it was an intense experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an n x n matrix where each row and each column is sorted in ascending order, return the kth smallest element in the matrix. Walk through both the min-heap approach and the binary-search-on-value approach, compare their time and space complexity, and discuss which one you'd prefer for very large matrices that don't fit in memory.
2 rounds phone screen(1 coding + 1 system design) and 4 rounds onsite interviews(1 coding + 1 design + 1 deep dive + 1 behavior).
general good experience but need fast coding
I applied through other source. I interviewed at OpenAI (Dublin, Dublin) in May 2026
Interview
Two hiring manager interviews. Followed by a technical interview on coding and system design. Asked to design a devbox system (CI/CD pipeline). For the coding roundm I was asked to design the LRU/LFU cache.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked to design the LRU/LFU cache.
design a devbox system (CI/CD pipeline).
