EliseAI·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jul 2026
EliseAI gave me a two-hour live coding exercise to build a working chatbot with the OpenAI API, and they wanted architecture decisions explained out loud the whole time. It was a lot to cover in one session and I'm still not sure how I came across.
- Design and implement a minimal but working conversational chatbot using the OpenAI API in two hours. Walk through your architecture choices as you go.
- How would you handle streaming responses from the OpenAI API in your implementation?
- What's your strategy for managing rate limits and retries when calling the OpenAI API?
- How would you approach session state and keeping conversation context across multiple turns?
- What lightweight persistence option would you use for this chatbot, and why?
- How would you add basic safety checks to the chatbot's inputs and outputs?
- Describe how you'd structure logging and metrics so you can debug problems quickly in production.
- How would an AI-assisted coding environment help you deliver this faster, and what are the limits of relying on it?
“Two hours sounds fine until you realize they want you to actually ship something runnable AND explain every decision.”