OpenAI interview prep
Forward Deployed, Solutions Architect and engineering interviews.
What OpenAI says: Skills-based assessments that vary by team, such as pair coding, take-home projects and technical tests. Final interviews take 4 to 6 hours with 4 to 6 people, over 1 to 2 days. Their page
The rounds
As candidates report them. Rounds and their order vary by team, so check with your recruiter.
Practice caseNo case yet
Screens
Final rounds
Screens
- Practical coding60 minutes, in partsProduction-quality code as the spec growsNo case yet
Final rounds
- Project deep diveFinal loopA system you built, in depthNo case yet
Cases
10questions
Are you ready? Readiness check
GQAwith RoPE, in NumPy
Fix the attention layer, then add a KV cache
5 daysto send it
Take-home: make a slow inference server fast
800 msfirst token, p95
Serve a 70B coding assistant at 400 requests a second
Same role, other companies
These rounds come up at other companies hiring for the same work.
24,000authorizations a second
Score card payments inside a 40 ms budget
168files of 5 GB
Ship an 840 GB checkpoint to 1,536 hosts
Halfthe time GPUs look idle
Run RL fine-tuning for a 32B model on 256 GPUs
3 weeksto launch
Review a teammate's design doc for a streaming API
Same seedsame text
A reproducible sampler with top-k, top-p and speculative acceptance
3 partsearlier tests keep passing
Build a continuous-batching scheduler with paged KV memory
Each case's source tag says which company and role reported its format, how many independent sources describe it, and when. It doesn't mean a company uses our question. Every scenario and number is ours. Preporato is not affiliated with OpenAI. These cases help you prepare and don't promise an interview or an offer.