Research Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at OpenAI with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 80% positive. To compare, the company-average is 38.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Research Engineer roles take an average of 18 days to get hired, when considering 5 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at OpenAI overall takes an average of 30 days.
Common stages of the interview process at OpenAI as a Research Engineer according to 5 Glassdoor interviews include:
Skills test: 33%
Phone interview: 33%
One on one interview: 33%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
it starts with HR screen followed by technical screen I applied online via their website. Process wasnt bad people were friendly - the interviewer seemed a bit zoned out though during the technical screen.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Good interview process, friendly I got asked to write code for a data loader and write the necessary tests for it
a recruiter reached out discussing team match followed by a hiring manager screen of the interested team, and then a technical interview testing general coding ability, followed by more technical screens focused on ML
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
implementation heavy leetcode style question involving array manipulation
I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at OpenAI in Jul 2025
Interview
HR called to talk about pass research experience and team preference, later informed I was moved into technical round, question is about ML debugging, should be fairly trivial if you have experience with pytorch