OpenAI onsite - 5 rounds done, Sora SD was the key round I think
OpenAI onsite - 5 rounds done, Sora SD was the key round I think
Result: Pending Number of Rounds: 5
Got here through a referral from a coworker. Phone screen was a couple months back. SD + coding. SD was a payment system design and coding was the infected plants problem (matrix epidemiology, 5 parts). Finished parts 1-3, ran out of time on 4.
Got an onsite invite within a week. Onsite ran over 2 days.
Coding rounds: GPU Credits (came up as expected), and a social feed problem with follow/unfollow/snapshot/friend recommendation. Both went okay. GPU Credits I've seen before. Social feed had a lot of parts. Got through 3 of 4.
System design was Sora video scheduling. Don't get intimidated by the video angle. It's really about resource allocation, worker preemption, and retry logic. Went deep on the failure modes: worker crashes mid-job, checkpointing, re-queuing. Interviewer asked very detailed follow-ups on error handling. Felt like this was the make-or-break round.
Cross-function round was with a researcher. Topic was collaboration experience working with non-engineers. Felt more like a chat.
Behavioral and project deep dive were fine. Deep dive interviewer wasn't familiar with my hardware background so we redirected to infra work which was okay.
Waiting now. Recruiter said debrief happens Tue/Thu. Hoping for good news next week.
Replies (4)
How long did the Sora SD go? Did they push into the retry/DLQ territory or stay at high level?
Went full 60 minutes. We got into exponential backoff, dead letter queue, and what happens when a worker terminates at 90% completion specifically.
Which team are you targeting? Infra or something else?
Platform infra / reliability. Fits my background.
The Sora SD being essentially a job scheduler wrapper is real. People overthink the video generation side of it.
Good luck. The Tue/Thu debrief thing is accurate. Usually hear back end of week.