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Software Engineer Interview Experience

June 9, 2026
Neutral ExperienceNo Offer

Process

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.

Questions

Given an $n \times n$ 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.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 49 interview experiences for the OpenAI Software Engineer role.

Success Rate

4%
Pass Rate

OpenAI's interview process for their Software Engineer roles is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive41%
Neutral35%
Negative24%

Candidates reported having good feelings for OpenAI's Software Engineer interview process.

OpenAI Work Experiences