OpenAI interview notes, page 43 of 67

“This one took me longer than I expected to get fully right.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“Classic idempotency problem and I knew the concept but fumbled the specifics under pressure.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“I started with the naive approach, full copy of the graph per snapshot, which works but blows up in space if you have millions of users and frequent snapshots.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“My first instinct was to split on dots and manually carry the overflow across octets, which works but the code got messy fast.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This was the main coding problem and it took up most of the session.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Onsite - Coding / Algorithms round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This one spiraled fast.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“Multi-source BFS, which I knew going in, but I fumbled the -1 case for a solid two minutes.” The rest of the author's notes on Machine Learning Engineer interview at OpenAI, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“I underestimated this at first.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This is a beast of a question.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This question is basically a full system design career arc compressed into 45 minutes.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at OpenAI, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.