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      Backend Software Engineer Interview

      18 Jun 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at OpenAI

      Interview

      Recruiter reach-out, followed by a live coding/systems screen, and a comprehensive 5-round onsite loop. The interviews are highly collaborative but incredibly dense, covering massive-scale data ingestion, high-throughput API layer design, and concrete systems optimization. They want engineers who can navigate deep ambiguity and make rapid, calculated technical trade-offs under high-compute pressures. To prepare for the level of ambiguity in their infrastructure round, I spent two weeks using Apex Interviewer. The AI platform acts like an elite, cynical interviewer that actively pushes back on your architectural assumptions, which forced me to practice defending my database scaling and parallelization choices with extreme precision before the real loop.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Design a high-availability token rate-limiting and quota management service capable of processing millions of globally distributed API requests per second with sub-millisecond latency.
      Answer question

      Other Backend Software Engineer interview reviews for OpenAI

      Backend Software Engineer Interview

      4 Apr 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      San Francisco, CA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA)

      Interview

      - Recruiter Call - 2 hours of initial screen consisting of a coding interview and a system design interview, with a 1 hour break in between. - 4 hours of onsite