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Shao Meng published a personal retrospective of the 2026 OpenAI software engineer (SWE) interview process. The retrospective shows that the process includes recruiter screening, two technical screens of about 60 minutes each on the same day, a take-home assignment of about 48 hours, a technical deep dive that probes the code line by line, and a 4-round onsite stage. The onsite coding is a progressive multi-part problem involving token-level streaming diff and rollback; the system design question is "Design ChatGPT," involving GPU allocation and autoscaling under non-stationary traffic. There is also an optional fifth round in beta, Agentic Coding, which requires using an AI coding agent to handle problems in large codebases that are difficult to address by hand. At present, this retrospective is Shao Meng's unilateral account, and no other sources have cross-corroborated it.
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Shao Meng
OpenAI Software Engineer Interview Process Retrospective: Including an Optional Agentic Coding Round
A 2026 OpenAI SWE interview retrospective shows that the process includes a recruiter screen, two technical screens of about 60 minutes each on the same day, a take-home assignment of about 48 hours, a technical deep dive that probes the code line by line, and 4 onsite rounds. The onsite coding includes a progressive multi-part problem (such as token-level streaming diff and rollback), and the system design question is "Design ChatGPT," involving GPU allocation and autoscaling under non-stationary traffic. There is also an optional fifth round, Agentic Coding, in the beta stage, which requires using an AI coding agent to handle problems in large codebases that are difficult to address by hand.
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