OpenAI interview notes, page 60 of 67

“My first instinct was to reach for something overly clever, like building a class hierarchy for each instruction type.” 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 one looks open-ended but you can spiral fast if you don't anchor early.” The rest of the author's notes on Product Manager interview at OpenAI, Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“Multi-source BFS from all starting X cells, track the max depth, done.” 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.

“The naive instinct is to just join everything with some delimiter and call it done.” 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 prompt that everything else branched off from.” 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.

“I knew the basic answer: it's a synchronization primitive that blocks all processes until every rank in the group hits the call.” 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.

“Pretty open-ended.” 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.

“The name threw me for a second but once I reframed it as a job scheduler the structure clicked.” 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 is the kind of question where the scope is so wide that you can easily spend 20 minutes on the wrong layer and never recover.” The rest of the author's notes on Machine Learning 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 was the meat of the whole thing.” The rest of the author's notes on Data Scientist 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.