I applied online. I interviewed at OpenAI (New York, NY) in Aug 2025
Interview
The process was pretty standard. One interviewer was very arrogant and kept interrupting me. Just your typical FAANG loop with higher ego is how I would describe it. If you can tame their egos, then you're good. If not, then you'll get cut.
After the recruiter screen, the first round is two technical interviews - coding and system design. I found the system design question challenging, and the interviewer took a very hands-off rather than collaborative approach compared to other interviewers. I did not progress beyond this round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for AI video generation based on text input.
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