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OpenAI Insight
Rejected
Platform SWE
1-3 Years
Jul 29, 2026
Process Overview
Two weeks from start to finish.
Evaluation Stages
Recruiter Screen
⏱ 20 mins
Behavioral
Motivation
The round focused on the candidate's interest in infrastructure work.
The discussion centered on the candidate's motivation for joining OpenAI.
Questions Asked
Why OpenAI and what kind of infrastructure work are you interested in?
Behavioral
Take Home Assignment
⏱ 48 hours
System Design
Coding
Testing
The task involved building a Webhook Delivery System with endpoint registration, event delivery, retries, and dead-letter queues.
The candidate utilized Python, FastAPI, and SQLite.
Emphasis was placed on clean code and testing over feature completeness.
The implementation included a worker process for polling, exponential backoff, and a circuit breaker mechanism.
Questions Asked
Build a Webhook Delivery System with retries and dead-letter queues.
System Design
Backend
Technical Deep Dive
⏱ 60 mins
Code Review
System Design
Debugging
The candidate walked through architectural decisions made during the take-home assignment.
The interviewer requested live extensions, specifically HMAC signature verification and event type filtering.
A critical bug regarding worker crashes and stuck events was identified.
The candidate and interviewer collaboratively designed a lease-based approach to handle event requeuing.
Questions Asked
Extend the webhook system with HMAC signature verification and event type filtering.
Security
Backend
System Design
⏱ 60 mins
System Design
Database Internals
The candidate was tasked with designing an in-memory database supporting basic SQL operations.
The candidate opted for a column-oriented storage approach.
The interviewer pushed for optimization of JOIN operations, moving from nested loop joins to hash or sort-merge joins.
The discussion evolved into implementing ACID guarantees using Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) and Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC).
The interviewer consistently probed deeper into every architectural decision, testing the limits of the candidate's knowledge.
Questions Asked
Design an in-memory database with support for CREATE, INSERT, SELECT, and JOIN operations.
System Design
Databases
Behavioral
Behavioral
Leadership
The interview covered topics including technical disagreements, failed projects, and prioritization.
The candidate provided an example of pushing back on a technical decision due to ethical concerns regarding excessive user data logging.
Questions Asked
Describe a time you pushed back on a technical decision for ethical reasons.
Behavioral
Executive Insights
Candidate Advice
Do not rush the take-home assignment, as it is a critical component for advancing to the onsite.
Acknowledge that system design rounds are excellent opportunities to identify personal knowledge gaps.
Focus on gaining production-level distributed database experience to improve performance in system design interviews.
Preparation Tips
Prioritize clean code and comprehensive testing in take-home assignments.
Be prepared to defend architectural choices and discuss trade-offs in depth.
Practice deep-dive technical discussions where every answer leads to further probing.
