Engineer lands OpenAI backend offer and shares the full interview breakdown
nian2326076 · reddit · 2026-10-14
A backend engineer shared his OpenAI offer on Reddit — where a cousin's first reaction was "guess you're paying for my wedding now," which annoyed him more than the interviews.
The useful part is the interview structure:
- Coding rounds: progressive multi-part builds, e.g. a durable key-value store that gains persistence then transactions, or an in-memory store growing in complexity.
- Refactor round: reading, cleaning and extending a messy existing codebase live.
- System design: backend- and AI-infrastructure-leaning, including inference serving.
- Plus a project deep dive.
His prep: rebuilding small stateful systems from scratch daily, narrating fixes while editing unfamiliar code, studying serving/scaling patterns, and rehearsing project stories.
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