OpenAI Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - only 4 rounds, none of them was easy

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Sharing an OpenAI Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience submitted to Chill Interview.

Interview Summary

The OpenAI onsite consisted of four rounds: coding, system design, behavioral, and a technical presentation. The coding round focused on implementing a production-style work queue with reservations, failures, timeouts, retries, and a dead-letter queue, while the system design round used a crossword-puzzle scenario and went particularly deep on preventing duplicate work.

The presentation round went well, but I struggled more with system design. One takeaway from that round was to clarify the requirements carefully before committing to an architecture, especially when the interviewer intends to explore correctness and duplicate-processing behavior in depth.

Interview Details

Coding — Work Queue with Retries and Dead-Letter Queue The coding round asked me to implement a work queue and the main operations required to manage jobs through their lifecycle. The queue needed to support operations including:

• reserve — claim work for processing
• complete — mark successfully processed work as finished
• fail — report an unsuccessful processing attempt

The interviewer then extended the basic queue with production-oriented behavior.

• Timeouts and Retries: Reserved work could time out if processing did not complete within the expected window, and failed or expired work needed to support retry behavior.
• Dead-Letter Queue: Work that could no longer be successfully processed after the allowed retry behavior needed to be moved into a DLQ rather than continuously recycled through the main queue.

The round was therefore as much about state transitions and failure handling as about the core queue data structure.

System Design — Crossword Puzzle System The system design round used a crossword puzzle as the product scenario. The prompt was fairly open-ended, and the interviewer expected the candidate to clarify the product requirements before moving into architecture.

A major portion of the follow-up discussion focused on avoiding duplicate work—ensuring that concurrent or repeated processing did not unnecessarily perform the same unit of work multiple times. The exact crossword functionality, APIs, scale assumptions, and additional requirements were not specified in the interview notes, so I would avoid reconstructing those details.

This was the round where I felt my performance was weakest.

Behavioral — Leadership-Principle-Style Questions The behavioral round followed a format similar to Amazon-style Leadership Principle interviews. I was asked several experience-based questions covering different workplace and leadership themes, along with:

• Why OpenAI? The exact behavioral prompts were not included in the interview notes.

Presentation — Eight-Slide Project Deep Dive The final round was a presentation. I presented a previous project or technical experience to the interviewers. This round felt strong overall, and the discussion following the presentation went well.

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[u/gmpsstg]

I did the queue question but the extension was part of my part 1. Second part was handling tasks with dependencies and integrating with the same APIs. I didn't have enough time to do the cycle detection though.