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Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California

October 8, 2026
Positive ExperienceGot Offer

Process

I applied online.

I applied online and then it took about 6 weeks for the recruiter call, then a technical screen on CoderPad. Mine was 90 minutes and it was coding plus a short design discussion in the same session. Not LeetCode. I had to build a small class, something like a scheduler, and then they kept adding requirements until it was a different problem. It felt like they cared way more about how I structured it and whether I wrote tests than any big-O stuff. I read some teams send a take-home instead of or on top of this; mine didn't, it depends on the team I guess.

The final round was virtual, 5 interviews over 2 days:

  • Two coding rounds: one was building something from scratch again, the other was existing code with issues and I had to refactor and fix it under time. That second one was the trickiest, easy to burn 15 minutes just reading if you don't force yourself to form a theory early.
  • System design: mine was around infra.
  • Project deep dive: where they went into a system I'd built, incidents, etc.
  • Hiring manager: a mix of behavioral and mission questions, like why OpenAI over the other labs.

Prep-wise, I did NeetCode first, which was mostly useless for this loop. What helped was building a couple of small things on the OpenAI API with proper tests, and DDIA for the design round. I did one mock with an ex-OpenAI engineer on Prepfully and he warned me the refactor round would be the one to watch, so I spent most of my last week on that and thank god I did. The recruiter mentioned the process is a little different per team, so you never know.

Questions

Simple insert/select/delete, but structured like an LSM tree using a memtable and tombstones instead of just wiping records.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 14 interview experiences for the OpenAI Software Engineer role in San Francisco, California.

Success Rate

7%
Pass Rate

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

Experience Rating

Positive64%
Neutral36%
Negative0%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for OpenAI's Software Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.

OpenAI Work Experiences