OpenAI is one of the key rising stars in the modern tech industry. With tools like ChatGPT and DALLE-2 propelling the AI research lab to new heights, it’s a fantastic time to join this rapidly growing company. In fact, according to Website Rating, OpenAI may earn a billion dollars in 2024 as they continue to expand.

At AI/ML Jobs, we understand the value of securing the right job in the industry. After all, our service is the perfect place to browse thousands of AI and machine learning jobs with a range of suitable filters to search based on your preferences.

In today’s guide, we’ll explore OpenAI’s interview process, looking at the process timeline, interview stages, and how you can nail the process in general to secure the best chances of success. 

Let’s begin!

OpenAI hiring process overview

Before we dive in deep, let’s look at an overview of OpenAI’s hiring process.

Hiring mission

OpenAI’s hiring mission is to find talented people with a range of backgrounds and perspectives and the passion to work collaboratively to build a safe AGI to benefit humanity at large. 

Hiring values

OpenAI has expressed how they want all candidates to face a consistent interview process with an opportunity to display their varying strengths. As opposed to being a credential-oriented organization, OpenAI focuses on potential team contributions and the specific value of candidates’ backgrounds.

Hiring timeline

The entire process from application to decision (so long as you progress through all stages) is likely to last three weeks or less. 

What they look for

OpenAI appreciates field experts but also those who show plenty of potential, even if they’ve yet to specialize.

The sort of potential OpenAI really looks for includes:

• Individuals with a clear ability to rapidly adapt and develop skills in a new domain
• Those with the capacity to produce results in new fields
• Candidates displaying an ability to work in teams and communicate effectively
• Those open to feedback
• Candidates aligned with OpenAI’s values and mission

Here’s what applicants say about the process

These are the sort of comments we found online from previous OpenAI applicants, expressing the good and the bad (paraphrased):

• The bar to succeed is very high
• Asked to discuss projects you’d like to work on if hired
• Faced troubleshooting questions but won’t be too specific due to NDA
• Convenient virtual interview process that featured 4-5 individuals cycling through
• Asked to provide a presentation

OpenAI hiring process stages & timeline overview

The OpenAI interview process generally involves the following stages:

1. Application and resume review
2. Introductory calls
3. Skills-based assessment
4. Final interviews
5. Decision

For the final interviews, you’ll face questions relevant to your expertise. OpenAI will also evaluate your communication and collaboration skills. All in all, though, you’ll want to give yourself the very best chances at each stage of the process to ultimately improve your odds of receiving a job offer at the end!

OpenAI interview stages

We’ll now take a look at each interview stage in a little more detail!

Stage 1: Application and resume review

Once you’ve found a suitable position, submit your application and résumé. You’ll likely hear back from OpenAI within a week.

Stage 2: Introductory calls

If you’re deemed a potential fit, OpenAI’s recruiting coordinator will email and schedule a talk with the recruiter or hiring manager. You can also ask recruiters questions along the way, of course.

Expect to talk about your previous work and academic experience. OpenAI will also ask about your motivations and career goals. OpenAI recommends that interviewees familiarize themselves with their recent updates. This is particularly true in regard to the team/role you’re applying for. OpenAI publishes news on their latest work via their blog.

Stage 3: Skills-based assessment

Within a week, OpenAI’s recruiting team will inform you whether you’ve made the next stage of the process. If successful, you’ll receive details for your next assessment. 

Assessment formats vary depending on the team you’re applying for. Formats include take-home projects, HackerRank tests, and pair coding interviews. OpenAI may ask you to undertake two or more assessments, depending on what sort of role you’re going for. All in all, though, your recruiting team will offer preparations to help you succeed.

Once the assessment is complete, you’ll hear back within another week to learn if you’ve made it to the final interviews.

Stage 4: Final interviews

While interviews can continue to take place virtually, you’ll have the option of on-site interviews at OpenAI’s San Francisco office for step four. For this stage, you’ll likely face four to six hours of final interviews with 4–6 individuals covering one or two days.

Interviews will focus on your expertise areas. Unsurprisingly, these interviews serve the purpose of pushing you past your comfort zone to really test your knowledge and abilities. Providing well-built solutions to the challenge you face is a great way of emphasizing your strengths as an engineer, as is good test coverage and excellent code.

Whatever role you’re going for, the ability to work well in a team and strong communication skills can greatly contribute to your chances of success. Also, OpenAI wants to see how you consider problems and how you go about solving them.

Stage 5: Decision

You’ll then likely hear back from OpenAI within a week of your final interviews. They may also ask you for references.

How to nail your OpenAI interviews

So, what can you do to give yourself the best odds of success when it comes to OpenAI interviews?

Use the STAR method to convey your strengths and experience

The STAR method is a great way to convey your potential value when facing behavioral interview questions. You can use the STAR method to frame your answers in a smart and effective manner.

But what is the STAR method exactly? Here are the four steps involved:

• Situation (S): Consider a situation you ran up against in a prior job where you faced and overcame challenges.
• Task (T): Next, convey the specific challenges/tasks you undertook.
• Action (A): You’ll also want to get across what actions you took in relation to these challenges and why.
• Result (R): Last but not least, discuss the results and anything you learned from the experience.

The STAR method works well for answering behavioral questions, but won’t apply to technical questions. When it comes to behavorial questions, you can communicate the situation, task, action, and result of a scenario relevant to the question. 

You’ll want to do so as smoothly and succinctly as possible—there’s no need to be overly detailed.

Practice answering behavioral & technical questions

Practice is key if you want to feel confident going into your OpenAI interviews—especially the technical assessments, but also the behavioral questions.

Luckily, past applicants have posted tons of behavioral and technical questions to sites like Indeed and Glassdoor that you can use to practice:

OpenAI behavioral interview questions

• Tell me about yourself
• Tell me about your background.
• What do you want to see from AI in the future?
• What are your long-term career goals?
• What sort of tools do you use to stay organized?
• Why apply for OpenAI?
• Have you ever had to deal with a team member with low emotional intelligence?

OpenAI technical interview questions

• Write a web crawler while putting emphasis on multithreading and multiprocessing
• Design something using OpenAI products.
• Debug forwards/backwards with multiprocessing to split large neural networks across machines.
• How do you select important variables while working on a data set?
• A data set is given to you and it has missing values which spread along 1 standard deviation from the mean. How much of the data would remain untouched?
• What is a confusion matrix and why do you need it?
• What is marginalization? Explain the process.
• How do we check the normality of a data set or a feature? 

One interviewee also raised that they were asked esoteric questions regarding AI and machine learning that were purposely asked without context given.

It goes without saying that the exact sort of questions you’ll face will depend on the job you’re going for. Regardless of the questions asked, the following tips can prove helpful:

• Enhance your understanding of essential tools like Jupyter, NumPy, and Pandas.
• Improve your understanding of machine learning fundamentals.
• Think about the big questions in relation to AI (e.g., consider how AI can best be used to benefit humanity).

Conclusion

In this guide, we’ve explored the OpenAI interview process timeline, the five stages involved, and how you can nail the interview process.

If you want to explore a wide range of jobs in the industry to keep your options open, visit AI/ML Jobs today. You can use our service to explore thousands of AI and machine learning jobs nationwide and worldwide.